Benedict Neo

“I experienced pleasure like a future pain.”
― Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion

“The third answer is the most difficult one to grasp, but it's also the one that can save you. The love you lost, or the love you wished for and never had: That love exists eternally. It shifts its shape, but it's always there. The task is to recognize it in its new form.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time--the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that that was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed. But then time passed and unthinkably grew dead again, and it turned out that that fullness had been an aberration and might never come back.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“What was “Cinderella,” if not an allegory for the fundamental unhappiness of shoe shopping?”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot