Quotes & Sayings About Him Not Feeling The Same

It was always the same feeling of sadness that washed over me when I drank. I never understood why I hadn't realized that if i stayed away from liqour, I might not be so depressed all the time about him. Maybe it was a sick form of torture that i really enjoyed. — Holly Hood

Wow," she said weakly. "That's even more amazing than I thought it would be."
Alex's arms were still looped around her waist; it took a serious effort not to draw her back to him and start kissing her again. He managed to control himself and grinned. "You mean with me or just in general?"
"In general," she said. "But I have a feeling it's especially amazing with you." She leaned back in his arms, studying him. Shaking her head with a slight smile, she reached out and stroked the line of his cheekbone. "Do you even realize how gorgeous you are?"
What he realized was that he was happier than he'd ever been. He gazed at Willow, drinking in her face, feeling amazed that this was happening
that she was here with him and that she actually felt the same way.
"Come here," he said softly. And pulling her toward him, he simply held her, cradling her against his chest. — L.A. Weatherly

Not the being lost, but the being found. It was the same feeling he got whenever he saw Marjorie. Like she had, somehow, found him. Months — Yaa Gyasi

Mr. Lecky never got any farther than the third floor. Not conscious of impossible fatigue, feeling less than his distress of the morning, he was notwithstanding seized by a faintness. This sudden spinning dizzied him. A darkness as impalpable, more discrete, yet blacker than night's, spun out from dancing points to overlapping disks. They were so wide, so close to his eyes, that he could not strike them off. He had only a second given him to see and apprehend. This same second loosened his grip on consciousness. He seemed to let go, hardly struggling. His muscles let go everywhere, too. He had time to hear, like some remote accident, the bang of the shotgun, gone, the smash of glass in at least one flashlight lens. This was the thin segment of the actual second, and Mr. Lecky knew nothing of himself slumping to lie on the stairs with the things he had dropped. — James Gould Cozzens

Sorry, I got hung up or I'd have been here earlier. I made sure I made it for closing, though. I didn't want the streets to suffer if you walked alone."
A glance at him showed his lips twitching. Humor, a new facet to my knight in leather armor; one I liked, given my oftentimes sarcastic attitude towards life. He wore the same leather duster of the previous evening, and, once again, I enviously admired it. Unable to resist, I reached out a hand and stroked its supple surface, feeling a thrill that my hand strayed so close to his actual body. "It's so soft," I murmured.
"Not for long, if you keep stroking it," he drawled. — Eve Langlais

When I think of Tobias it is not with the same feeling as when I think of Khajami. How could it be the same, when a child and a husband demand a different kind of love altogether from your heart? It does not feel as though Tobias is still inside of me. He was my husband, my protector, and I respected him. I miss Tobias, and I am proud that I was his wife. A kind of emptiness and happiness are woven together inside my voice when the other washing women ask me about what my husband was like, and I answer with words that lift up to the sky. — Melanie Schnell

When there is a huge crack in your relationship with someone, you wonder what others do in similar situations. I realize I'm trying as hard as I can to present myself as the most unthreatening being in the world, like a small animal. I hunch into myself, avoiding going back to the same places I frequented with him. Obviously I don't eat the kind of food we ate or made together. But I don't think I'm going to move to a new house, because I have the kitchen and the large fridge that I'd wanted for so long. People say you can't possibly like your lover every single second of your life. But that's not true. I liked and looked to my lover every single second we were together. And I still can't admit that he's gone. True sorrow is when one person desires but the other doesn't. I don't know any better words to describe it, and I can't yet express this feeling through any kind of food. The one thing we know about sorrow is that it's a very personal, individual feeling. — Kyung-ran Jo

"What for?" I said. "What for, Tante Lou? He treated me the same way he treated her. He wants me to feel guilty, just as he wants her to feel guilty. Well, I'm not feeling guilty, Tante Lou. I didn't put him there. I do everything I know how to do to keep people like him from going there. He's not going to make me feel guilty." — Ernest Gaines

The new-born child does not realize that his body is more a part of himself than surrounding objects, and will play with his toes without any feeling that they belong to him more than the rattle by his side; and it is only by degrees, through pain, that he understands the fact of the body. And experiences of the same kind are necessary for the individual to become conscious of himself; but here there is the difference that, although everyone becomes equally conscious of his body as a separate and complete organism, everyone does not become equally conscious of himself as a complete and separate personality ... It is such that he, as little conscious of himself as the bee in a hive, who are lucky in life, for they have the best chance of happiness: their activities are shared by all, and their pleasures are only pleasures because they are enjoyed in common ... It is because of them that man has been called a social animal. — W. Somerset Maugham

Then, already, it had brought to his mind the silence brooding over beds in which he had let men die. There as here it was the same solemn pause, the lull that follows battle; it was the silence of defeat. But the silence now enveloping his dead friend, so dense, so much akin to the nocturnal silence of the streets and of the town set free at last, made Rieux cruelly aware that this defeat was final, the last disastrous battle that ends a war and makes peace itself an ill beyond all remedy. The doctor could not tell if Tarrou had found peace, now that all was over, but for himself he had a feeling that no peace was possible to him henceforth, any more than there can an armistice for a mother bereaved of a son or for a man who buries his friend. — Albert Camus

He reminded me that he himself had been very frightened on this same spot, once, not so long ago. He told me he knew exactly what it was like to feel what I was feeling, and he didn't envy me. But now he said that I didn't have to think about another thing for the moment, because he was calling the shots. He was the one who was going to decide what happened next, which suddenly was OK with me. At that particular moment I would have followed him anywhere. — Sarah Moore Fitzgerald

He leans across the table gripping my wrests, tightly but gently at the same time "I am not kidding you," He says the tone of his voice changes into a bit off a deeper more serious tone "I think you need to watch your back."
"From you," I say to him, feeling my blood rise "Your warning me to stay away from you, and if it wasn't for this exam and for the purpose of getting good end of year twelve results I wouldn't step a foot closer to you then I have to. — Mjroco Hutchin

I am in awe of Sam's decision to abandon capitals and punctuation but am not brave enough to do the same. I like to imagine the day he, as the Americans say, made the change he wished to see in the world. I like to think it came to him suddenly. Perhaps he was swimming - no, too active - or napping indoors on a hot day - no, too bourgeois - probably he was in Scotland during the midge season and he left the desk lamp on and the window open when he went out for a meaningful walk. It was dark and the midges were drawn to the lamplight and - thinking it was the moon - fried themselves against the bulb, falling in their tens and tens, cooked on the pages of Sam's poems. So when he returned some time later, with bites on his neck, he found his poems loaded with punctuation, asterisks, grammar lying dead on his manuscript and his instant reaction was disgust, a feeling that then infected his whole aesthetic. — Joe Dunthorne

He was not sure that there were any great moments. Things were not the same and now life only came in flashes. He had flashes of the old greatness with his bulls, but they were not of value because he had discounted them in advance when he had picked the bulls out for their safety, getting out of a motor and leaning on a fence, looking over at the herd on the ranch of his friend the bull-breeder. So he had two small, manageable bulls without much horns, and when he felt the greatness again coming, just a little of it through the pain that was always with him, it had been discounted and sold in advance, and it did not give him a good feeling. It was the greatness, but it did not make bull-fighting wonderful to him any more. — Ernest Hemingway,

Gradually the events of the preceding night crept with silent, blood-stained feet into his brain and reconstructed themselves there with terrible distinctness. He winced at the memory of all that he had suffered, and for a moment the same curious feeling of loathing for Basil Hallward that had made him kill him as he sat in the chair came back to him, and he grew cold with passion. The dead man was still sitting there, too, and in the sunlight now. How horrible that was! Such hideous things were for the darkness, not for the day. — Oscar Wilde

He was still amazed by it. Not by the fear he'd felt throughout the day, when the woman who was no more than a stranger to him had dragged him farther and farther from home, but by the fullness of love and protection he'd felt later, when his family had finally found him. Not the being lost, but the being found. It was the same feeling he got whenever he saw Marjorie. Like she had, somehow, found him. — Yaa Gyasi

Des felt a familiar feeling in the pit of his stomach. All soldiers felt the same thing going into battle, whether they admitted it or not: fear. Fear of failure, fear of dying, fear of watching their friends die, fear of being wounded and living out the rest of their days crippled or maimed. The fear was always there, and it would devour you if you let it.
Des knew how to turn that fear to his own advantage. Take what makes you weak and turn it into something that makes you strong. Transform the fear into anger and hate: hatred of the enemy; hatred of the Republic and the Jedi. The hate gave him strength, and the strength brought him victory.
For Des the transformation came easily once the fighting started. Thanks to his abusive father, he'd been turning fear into anger and hate ever since he was a child. Maybe that was why he was such a good soldier. Maybe that was why the others looked to him for leadership. — Drew Karpyshyn

When she came to her senses again she cut off all contact with him. It had not been easy, but she had steeled herself. The last time she saw him she was standing on a platform in the tunnelbana at Gamla Stan and he was sitting in the train on his way downtown. She had stared at him for a whole minute and decided that she did not have a grain of feeling left, because it would have been the same as bleeding to death. Fuck you. — Stieg Larsson

Manon found herself walking toward the wyvern, and stopped with not five feet between them. "He's mine," Manon said, taking in the scars, the limp, the burning life in those eyes. The witch and the wyvern looked at each other for a moment that lasted for a heartbeat, that lasted for eternity. "You're mine," Manon said to him. The wyvern blinked at her, Titus's blood still dripping from his cracked and broken teeth, and Manon had the feeling that he had come to the same decision. Perhaps he had known long before tonight, and his fight with Titus hadn't been so much about survival as it had been a challenge to claim her. As his rider. As his mistress. As his. — Sarah J. Maas

There was once a man who lost his shadow. I forget what happened to him, but it was dreadful. As for me, I've lost my own image. I did not look at it often; but it was there, in the background, just as Maurice had drawn it for me. A straightforward, genuine, "authentic" woman, with out mean-mindedness, uncompromising, but at the same time understanding, indulgent, sensitive, deeply feeling, intensely aware of things and of people, passionately devoted to those she loved and creating happiness for them. A fine life, serene, full, "harmonious." It is dark: I cannot see myself anymore. And what do the others see? Maybe something hideous. — Simone De Beauvoir

The deadweight of his body,coupled with the aches, made him remember back to a time when he'd gotten colds or flus. Same feeling. Was it possible he was getting sick?
Made him wonder if anyone had come up with a product like Dead-quil or some shit.
Probably not. — J.R. Ward

Cinder tensed briefly, before melting into the kiss. The rush was the same every time, coupled with surprise and a wave of giddiness. It was their seventeenth kiss (her brain interface was keeping a tally, somewhat against her will), and she wondered if she would ever get used to this feeling. Being desired, when she'd spent her life believing no one would ever see her as anything but a bizarre science experiment. Especially not a boy. Especially not Kai, who was smart and honorable and kind, and could have had any girl he wanted. Any girl. She sighed against him, leaning into the embrace. — Marissa Meyer

... Like having to be able to say to yourself, 'I am pretending to sit here reading Albert Camus's The Fall for the Literature of Alienation midterm, but actually I'm really concentrating on listening to Steve try to impress this girl over the phone, and I am feeling embarrassment and contempt for him, and am thinking he's a poser, and at the same time I am also uncomfortably aware of times that I've also tried to project the idea of myself as hip and cynical so as to impress someone, meaning that not only do I sort of dislike Steve, which in all honesty I do, but part of the reason I dislike him is that when I listen to him on the phone it makes me see similarities and realize things about myself that embarrass me, but I don't know how to quit doing them - like, if I quit trying to seem nihilistic, even just to myself, then what would happen, what would I be like? — David Foster Wallace

He understood not only that she was close to him, but that he no longer knew where she ended and he began. He understood it in the painful feeling of being split which he experienced at that moment. He was offended at first, but in that same instant he felt that he could not be offended by her, that she was him. In the first moment he felt like a man who, having suddenly received a violent blow from behind, turns with vexation and a desire for revenge to find out who did it, and realizes that he has accidentally struck himself, that there is no one to be angry with and he must endure and ease the pain. — Leo Tolstoy

During his depression he lost that forward momentum. In fact, the loss of it was the very thing that was wrong with him. It was time without nuance or modulation, always the same, minute by minute, day by day. He knew nothing of the defeat or futility that people assumed he was feeling. He was simply not there, an absence, an empty space. — A.S.A Harrison

But the second kind seek out the women who love women, who can procure a young man for them and add to the pleasure which they get from finding themselves with him; much more, they can, in the same way, find the same pleasure with them as with a man. [ ... ] For in the relationships they have with them, they play the role of another woman for the women who love women, and the woman offers them at the same time more or less what they find in a man, so that the jealous friend suffers from feeling that the man he loves is inseparable from the woman who is for him almost a man, at the same time as he feels him almost escaping from him, because, for these women, he is something he does not know, a sort of woman. — Marcel Proust

I don't know why - it's just that - I don't know - they're not kin." - Surprising word, I think to myself never used it before. Not of kin - sounds like hillbilly talk - not of a kind - same root - kindness, too - they can't have real kindness toward him, they're not his kin
. That's exactly the feeling.
Old word, so ancient it's almost drowned out. What a change through the centuries. Now anybody can be "kind." And everybody's supposed to be. Except that long ago it was something you were born into and couldn't help. Now it's just a faked-up attitude half the time, like teachers the first day of class. But what do they really know about kindness who are not kin. — Robert M. Pirsig

Jan had friends who like him had left their old homeland and who devoted all their time to the struggle for its lost freedom. All of them had sometimes felt that the bond tying them to their country was just an illusion and that only enduring habit kept them prepared to die for something they did not care about. They all knew that feeling and at the same time were afraid of knowing it; they turned their heads away from fear of seeing the border and stumbling (lured by vertigo as by an abyss) across it to the other side, where the language of their tortured people make a noise as trivial as the twittering of birds. — Milan Kundera

This is what he told us: "You will from time to time meet a patient who shares a disturbing tale of multiple mistakes in his previous treatment. He has been seen by several clinicians, and all failed him. The patient can lucidly describe how his therapists misunderstood him, but he has quickly perceived that you are different. You share the same feeling, are convinced that you understand him, and will be able to help." At this point my teacher raised his voice as he said, "Do not even think of taking on this patient! Throw him out of the office! He is most likely a psychopath and you will not be able to help him. — Daniel Kahneman

It is easy to say that you can adopt the whole human race as your children, but it is not the same as living in a home with a child and shaping all you do to help him learn to be happy and whole and good. Don't live your life without ever holding a child in your arms, on your lap, in your home, and feeling a child's arms around you and hearing his voice in your ear and seeing his smile, given to you because you put it into your heart. — Orson Scott Card

Charles loved her voice. It was so soft and blurred, like pastels. It made his neck tingle just to listen to her. It gave him the same delicious feeling he had as he hovered on the brink of sleep and this feeling - until now - had been the single most pleasant feeling in his life. It was the voice that coloured everything he now thought about her. It was shy and tentative and musical. Sometimes he did not manage to hear the words she said, but he did not let on about his deafness. — Peter Carey

Tilting her face back, he looked into her eyes. They were unfocused, unable to settle on his face. And the same terrifying feeling stole over him once again. An acute fear - a final, painful realization - that her world was one of utter blackness. At last he realized the magnitude
of her blindness. He couldn't imagine never seeing her again.
It was like a death, the inevitable conclusion when someone was gone. Why it should hit him now, after all these years, he could not fathom, but it was there, and finally he understood her private hell. He'd told her he would die without sight. Selfish, arrogant bastard, concerned
with his own needs, his own perversions to watch
himself pleasure her, to study her as she accepted him, to watch their bodies joined. How carelessly he had said that, not thinking of Elizabeth and what she would die for. What she wanted in this life. — Charlotte Featherstone

Curran was looking at her. Not in the same way he looked at me, but he was looking. An odd feeling flared in me, hot and angry, prickling my throat from the inside with hot sharp needles, and I realized it was jealousy. I guess there was a first time for everything. "Have you seen my father?" Lorelei asked. "How is he?" "I saw him last year," Curran said. "He's the same as always: tough and ornery." I came to stand next to him. Lorelei raised her eyebrows. Her eyes widened, and a sheen of pale green rolled over her irises. "You must be the human Consort." Yes, that's me, the human invalid. "My name is Kate." "Kate," she repeated, as if tasting the word. "It is an honor to meet you." Curran was smiling at her, that handsome hot smile that usually made my day better. Pushing Lorelei into the ocean wouldn't be diplomatic, even if I really wanted to do it. "Likewise. — Ilona Andrews

So full. Full of lobster meat and the sadness of the lobster meat. Full of the feeling of having cracked hundreds upon hundreds of precious shells. Full of the sound and the sight of destruction, the lobsters dead in a pile, some of them with lipstick marks on their empty husks. Their voices piled up on one another. I felt a whispering coming from deep within my belly, the voices not yet at rest, and they said in a tone sympathetic and unsympathetic at the same time, Next Next Next. 'Well,' I said, 'what do we do next?' 'Lobster dinner?' he asked, chuckling a little as if I ought to be chuckling with him as well. — Alexandra Kleeman

It results from the preceding considerations, that there is in reality nothing desired except happiness. Whatever is desired otherwise than as a means to some end beyond itself, and ultimately to happiness, is desired as itself a part of happiness, and is not desired for itself until it has become so. Those who desire virtue for its own sake, desire it either because the consciousness of it is a pleasure, or because the consciousness of being without it is a pain, or for both reasons united; as in truth the pleasure and pain seldom exist separately, but almost always together, the same person feeling pleasure in the degree of virtue attained, and pain in not having attained more. If one of these gave him no pleasure, and the other no pain, he would not love or desire virtue, or would desire it only for the other benefits which it might produce to himself or to persons whom he cared for. — John Stuart Mill

You've got a lot of responsibility now," Jace said to Julian. "You'll have to make sure Emma winds up with a guy who deserves her."
Julian was strangely white-faced. Maybe he was feeling the effects of the ceremony, Emma thought. It had been strong magic; she still felt it sizzling through her blood like champagne bubbles. But Jules looked as if he'd been slapped.
"What about me?" Emma said, quickly. "Don't I have to make sure Jules winds up with someone who deserves him?"
"Absolutely. I did it for Alec, Alec did it for me - well, actually, he hated Clary at first, but he came around."
"I BET you didn't like Magnus much, either," said Julian, still with the same odd, stiff look on his face.
"Maybe not," said Jace, "but I never would have said so."
"Because it would have hurt Alec's feelings?" Emma asked.
"No," said Jace, "because Magnus would have turned me into a hat rack. — Cassandra Clare

Narcissism is, in a sense, the converse of an habitual sense of sin; it consists in the habit of admiring oneself and wishing to be admired. Up to a point it is, of course, normal, and not to be deplored; it is only in its excesses that it becomes a grave evil. In many women, especially rich Society women, the capacity for feeling love is completely dried up, and is replaced by a powerful desire that all men should love them. When a woman of this kind is sure that a man loves her, she has no further use for him. The same thing occurs, though less frequently, with men; the classic example is the hero of Liaisons Dangereuses. When vanity is carried to this height, there is no genuine interest in any other person, and therefore no real satisfaction to be obtained from love. — Bertrand Russell

How are you feeling, man?" he asks me.
"Great," I tell him, and it is purely the truth. Doves clatter up out of a bare tree and turn at the same instant, transforming themselves from steel to silver in the snow-blown light. I know at that moment that the drug is working. Everything before me has become suddenly, radiantly itself. How could Carlton have known this was about to happen? "Oh," I whisper. His hand settles on my shoulder.
"Stay loose, Frisco," he says. "There's not a thing in this pretty world to be afraid of. I'm here."
I am not afraid. I am astonished. I had not realized until this moment how real everything is. A twig lies on the marble at my feet, bearing a cluster of hard brown berries. The broken-off end is raw, white, fleshly. Trees are alive.
"I'm here," Carlton says again, and he is. — Michael Cunningham

It was as if the demise of the owner had lent the flat a physical void it hadn't had before. At the same time he had the feeling that he wasn't alone. Harry believed in the existence of the soul. Not that he was particularly religious as such, but it was one thing which always struck him when he saw a dead body: the body was bereft of something ... the creature had gone, the light had gone,there was not the illusory afterglow that long-since burned-out stars have. The body was missing its soul and it was the absence of the soul that made Harry believe. — Jo Nesbo

You can be good for the mere sake of goodness; you cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness. You can do a kind action when you are not feeling kind and when it gives you no pleasure, simply because kindness is right; but no one ever did a cruel action simply because cruelty is wrong - only because cruelty is pleasant or useful to him, In other words, badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled. — C.S. Lewis

He had never loved anything except what was inevitable. The people fate had imposed on him, the world as it appeared to him, everything in his life he had not been able to avoid ... For the rest, for everything he had to choose, he made himself love, which is not the same thing. No doubt he had known the feeling of wonderment, passion, and even moments of tenderness. But each moment had sent him on to other moments, each person to others, and he had loved nothing he had chosen, except what was little by little imposed on him by circumstance, had lasted as much by accident as by intention, and finally became necessary: Jessica. — Albert Camus

Sometimes I have the feeling that we're in one room with two opposite doors and each of us holds the handle of one door, one of us flicks an eyelash and the other is already behind his door, and now the first one has but to utter a word ad immediately the second one has closed his door behind him and can no longer be seen. He's sure to open the door again for it's a room which perhaps one cannot leave. If only the first one were not precisely like the second, if he were calm, if he would only pretend not to look at the other, if he slowly set the room in order as though it were a room like any other; but instead he does exactly the same as the other at his door, sometimes even both are behind the doors and the the beautiful room is empty. Franz Kafka (in a letter to Milena Jesenska) — Edmund White

Daniel looked down the barrel of the shotgun al set to blow his
brains out and grinned. These days, even a gun-toting, trigger-happy
female was a delight to behold, and she was perfect.
Sunlight streamed in through the kitchen window. She all but shone
with it, like an angel or a princess or something. Something a little
overdue for a bath and a lot on edge, but something very good just
the same. The feeling of sweet relief rushing through him nearly
buckled his knees.
Tall and curvy, around thirty at a guess, and uninfected, she was by
far the best thing he had ever seen in jeans and a t-shirt. Not even the
dried blood splattered on the wal behind her could diminish the
picture she made.
Sadly, his girl did not appear to share his joy — Kylie Scott

Amitai shook his head, almost smiling, because here he was, feeling for the first time that the tragedy of European Jewry did belong to him. Before today, his lack of personal connection to the Holocaust had made it a distant history, no more relevant to him than any other. But Natalie, the locket, the painting, the Hall of Names, taking responsibility for Komlos in the Pages of Testimony, these had brought him to he realization that, merely by virtue of being a Jew, even a Jew from another place and time, it was his history, too. Not personally, but collectively. It belonged to him, as he belonged to all those Jews rising up into the infinite ceiling in the Hall of Names. He and Natalie were in the same place, but they had come from different directions. — Ayelet Waldman

This gave him another opportunity to use one of those words that hung before him, shining and alluring. Far away in the distance there were more of them, dangerously sharp. Words that were not for him, but which he used all the same on the sly, and which had an exciting flavour and gave him a tingling feeling in the head. They were a little dangerous, all of them. — Tarjei Vesaas

But the passenger, having named the place he wants to go and knowing himself as helpless to act on the course of events as the dark box that encloses him, abandons himself to the pleasant feeling of being freed from all responsibility, or he ponders on what lies before him, or on what lies behind him, saying, Twill not be ever thus, and then in the same breath, But twas ever thus, for there are not five hundred different kinds of passengers. And so they hasten, the horse, the driver, and the passenger, towards the appointed place, by the shortest route or deviously, through the press of other misplaced persons. — Samuel Beckett

She pushed the bathroom door open to discover Magnus lurking on the other side, clutching a towel in one hand and his glittery hair in the other. He must have slept on it, she thought, because one side of the glittered spikes looked dented in. "Why does it take girls so long to shower?" he demanded. "Mortal girls, Shadowhunters, female warlocks, you're all the same. I'm not getting any younger waiting out here."
Clary stepped aside to let him pass. "How old are you, anyway?" she asked curiously.
Magnus winked at her. "I was alive when the Dead Sea was just a lake that was feeling a little poorly."
Clary rolled her eyes.
Magnus made a shooing moving. "Now move your petite behind. I need to get in there; my hair is a wreck. — Cassandra Clare

From that evening, Swann understood that the feeling which Odette had once had for him would never revive, that his hopes of happiness would not be realised now. And the days on which, by a lucky chance, she had once more shewn herself kind and loving to him, or if she had paid him any attention, he recorded those apparent and misleading signs of a slight movement on her part towards him with the same tender and sceptical solicitude, the desperate joy that people reveal who, when they are nursing a friend in the last days of an incurable malady, relate, as significant facts of infinite value: "Yesterday he went through his accounts himself, and actually corrected a mistake that we had made in adding them up; he ate an egg to-day and seemed quite to enjoy it, if he digests it properly we shall try him with a cutlet to-morrow,"
although they themselves know that these things are meaningless on the eve of an inevitable death. — Marcel Proust

She had always dimly guessed him to be in touch with important people, involved in complicated relations - but she felt it all to be so far beyond her understanding that the whole subject hung like a luminous mist on the farthest verge of her thoughts. In the foreground, hiding all else, there was the glow of his presence, the light and shadow of his face, the way his short-sighted eyes, at her approach, widened and deepened as if to draw her down into them; and, above all, the flush of youth and tenderness in which his words enclosed her. Now she saw him detached from her, drawn back into the unknown, and whispering to another girl things that provoked the same smile of mischievous complicity he had so often called to her own lips. The feeling possessing her was not one of jealousy: she was too sure of his love. It was rather a terror of the unknown, of all the mysterious attractions that must even now be dragging him away from her, and of her own powerlessness to contend with them. — Edith Wharton

It's just I get this feeling
and I can't believe I'm telling you this
but I get this feeling that life with him will be really, really good, but that I'm not a key part of that. You could take me out of the equation, replace me with someone else, and it would be the same equation. — Scott Hutchins

Winter solstice: the darkest time of the year. No sooner has he woken up in the morning than he feels the day beginning to slip away from him. There is no light to sink his teeth into, no sense of time unfolding. Rather, a feeling of doors being shut, of locks being turned. It is a hermetic season, a long moment of inwardness. The outer world, the tangible world of materials and bodies, has come to seem no more than an emanation of his mind. He feels himself sliding through events, hovering like a ghost around his own presence, as if he were living somewhere to the side of himself - not really here, but not anywhere else either. A feeling of having been locked up, and at the same time of being able to walk through walls. He notes somewhere in the margins of a thought: a darkness in the bones. — Paul Auster

Sometimes when I think of Jesper all I can see is his dark back on the way across the white sea to Hirsholmene. It gets smaller and smaller and I stand at the edge of the ice feeling empty. Why didn't he ask me to go with him? I have a will of my own but if he had asked, I wouldn't have hesitated. I always went with him. After all, I had to look after him and he had to look after me, and my father would be furious with us both. Staying there alone was meaningless.
Sometimes I imagine he tells me everything, but I know that's not true. He never told me if he went all the way to Hirsholmene. I don't tell him everything either, but I feel he knows what I am thinking, and I know what HE thinks. I have taught myself to do that.
And yet all the same I am not sure. — Per Petterson

The new-born child does not realise that his body is more a part of himself than surrounding objects, and will play with his toes without any feeling that they belong to him more than the rattle by his side; and it is only by degrees, through pain, that he understands the fact of the body. And experiences of the same kind are necessary for the individual to become conscious of himself; but here there is the difference that, although everyone becomes equally conscious of his body as a separate and complete organism, everyone does not become equally conscious of himself as a complete and separate personality. — W. Somerset Maugham

My father has the irritating habit of saying the same thing whenever something bad happens. "This, too, shall pass," he says. What annoys me is that he's always right about it. What annoys me even more is that he always reminds me later when it does pass, as a smug "I told you so."

He doesn't say it to me anymore because Mom told him it was trite. Maybe it is, but I find that I say it to myself now. No matter how bad I'm feeling, I make myself say it, even if I'm not ready to believe it. This, too, shall pass. It's amazing how little things like that can make a big difference. — Neal Shusterman

Thack seemed to sort something out for a moment.
"Sometimes I watch him when he's playing with Harry or digging in the yard. And I think: This is it, this is the guy I've waited for all my life. Then this other voice tells me not to get used to it, that it'll only hurt more later. It's funny. You're feeling this enormous good fortune and waiting for it to be over at the same time."
"You seem happy," Brian ventured.
"I am."
"Well ... that's a lot. I envy you that."
Thack shrugged. "All we've got is now, I guess. But that's all anybody gets. If we wasted that time being scared ... "
"Absolutely. — Armistead Maupin