“Are you anything akin to me, do you think, Jane?”
I could risk no sort of answer by this time; my heart was full.
“Because,” he said, “I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you — especially when you are near to me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous Channel, and two hundred miles or so of land, come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapped; and then I’ve a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly.”
from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
“I’d just go into the bathroom and sit in the stall and ball my eyes out. I wanted to be alone, but I leaped at every bullshit opportunity to surround myself with more people. There was this empty whole in my chest; I could almost hear it. Sometimes I’d think I had to take a shit, or that I needed to get laid or have a cigarette, or maybe if I drank five shots in rapid succession I could wet it up and fill it up, but I’d do all that and this desolate whole under my rib cage would still be there: right above my stomach and below my heart.”
from Ash Wednesday by Ethan Hawke
“We are friends and I do like to spend the day with you in serious and inconsequential chatter. I wouldn’t mind washing up beside you, reading the back half of the paper while you read the front. We are friends and I would miss you, do miss you and think of you very often.”
from Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson
