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Connor H

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“But the guilt of outliving those you love is justly to be borne, she thought. Outliving is something we do to them. The fantasies of dying could be no stranger than the fantasies of living. Surviving is perhaps the strangest fantasy of them all.”
― Eudora Welty, The Optimist's Daughter

tags: death-and-dying, survivor-s-guilt

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“There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

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“She was not aware of loneliness so much as of endeavour: her future career as a writer, of which there was as yet no sign, would, she thought, in time validate her entire existence. Until then she would adopt—had already adopted—a regime which would steel her against rejection and disappointment.”
― Anita Brookner, A Closed Eye

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“I didn’t know then that some people die long before their real death. Nor did I imagine that the last time you saw them might also be the last time they were truly alive.”
― Magda Szabó, Katalin Street

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“When I think of the books I love, there’s always a little laughter in the dark. I love Jane Eyre; I don’t love Wuthering Heights. I love Tolstoy; I don’t love Dostoevsky. I love Joyce; I don’t love Proust. I love Nabokov; I don’t love Pasternak. I don’t think I’m a funny person, but the fiction I grew up on was leavened with humor—I understand the other tradition and I admire it, but I just don’t love it. It never occurs to me to write as, say, A. S. Byatt writes, as I’m sure she would never dream in a squillion years of writing like me. The ironic theme in English writing—and I don’t mean po-mo irony, I mean the irony of someone like Defoe or Dickens—is either in you or it isn’t. Those who find Austen arch and cold and ironical, lacking the kind of intimate and metaphysical commitment of a writer like Emily Brontë cannot be convinced otherwise and vice versa. I appreciate both schools, but I can’t get out of the side I’m on. I don’t think I’d want to, though occasionally I have wet dreams about turning into Iris Murdoch.”
― Zadie Smith

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