Lines I discover that make required readings worth it.

• The anesthetizing influence of habit having ceased, I would begin to have thoughts, and feelings, and they are such sad things. - Combray (Part I of Swann’s Way) by Marcel Proust
• But even with respect to the most insignificant things in life, none of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others. - Combray (Part I of Swann’s Way) by Marcel Proust
• He wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt you / but he thinks / this is a lie, so he says in the end / you're dead, nothing can hurt you / which seems to him / a more promising beginning, more true. - A Myth of Devotion by Louise Glück
• Perhaps Jimmy thinks there is virtue in writing to someone you don’t know; it could be a cathartic device, a kind of intellectual emetic workable only in this case because you are the unknown Michael Linder and I could be impolite and boorish with impunity. - Fenia (His Native Coast by Edith Tiempo)
• It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff, now; so he shall never know how I love him; and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same, and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning or frost from fire. - Catherine Earnshaw (Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte)
  • Reread this and highlight.
• We tell ourselves stories in order to live. - The White Album by Joan Didion
• Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
• Tapos, sabi natin, kelan pa kaya tayo lalaki? Atat na atat tayong lumaki ka’gad para tayo na ang magdesisyon sa buhay natin. Para nakakagawa na tayo ng mga sarili nating pasiya. Pero putang’na, Monica, ngayong ang lalaki na natin — hindi lang nga ang lalaki na natin kundi ang tatanda na natin — gumagawa nga tayo ng sarili nating mga pasiya, pumapalpak naman tayo. Hinahangad tuloy natin na sana, maging bata tayo uli. - Emil (Sila, at ang Gabi ni Lualhati Bautista)

Kimiko (from yohjiro, RareJob)

• Kimiko's monologue + "But what she had foretold came true ;-- for time dries all tears and quiets all longing; and even in Japan one does not really try to die twice for the same despair."
• He knows that the space between the sun and him is less than the space between himself and the woman who loved him.