Little Fires Everywhere

• "the underlying philosophy being that everything could--and should--be planned out, and that by doing so you could avoid the unseemly, the unpleasant, and the disastrous"
• "Everyone sees race,Lex", said Moody. "The only difference is who pretends not to."
• and Mia realized that she was crossing into a place she would have to go alone.

Jane Eyre

• now I remembered that the real world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitements, awaited those who had courage to go forth into its expanse, to seek real knowledge of life amidst its perils
• This was very pleasant; there is no happiness like that of being loved by your fellow-creatures, and feeling that your presence is an addition to their comfort.
• "I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you."
• "I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself."

The Idiot (Elif Batuman)

• It was hard to feel cheerful when someone kept telling you you were a little fish in a big sea.
• She believed, and I did, too, that every story had a central meaning. You could get that meaning, or you could miss it completely.
• It had never occurred to me to think of aesthetics and ethics as opposites. I thought ethics were aesthetic. “Ethics” meant the golden rule, which was basically an aesthetic rule. That’s why it was called “golden”, like the golden ratio.
• Meanwhile, I went from class to class, read hundreds, thousands of pages of the distilled ideas of the great thinkers of human history, and nothing happened. In high school I had been full of opinions, but high school had been like prison, with constant opposition and obstacles. Once the obstacles were gone, meaning seemed to vanish, too.
• She saw objects round her and understood everything that was going on, but she could not form opinions about anything and did not know what to talk about. - Chekhov, The Darling
• Space and time shut down, one dimension at a time, the sky collapsing from a dome to a plane, the plane collapsing into a line, and then there were no surroundings, there was nothing but forward, and then there wasn’t even forward