I sat up and rubbed my eyes and then it dawned on me. But I couldn’t believe it. It was too simple. My God, can a person live twenty-five years, a life of crucifixion, through a misunderstanding? Yes! I stood up. I had discovered that a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself. One is free.
— Kate Cutrer, from Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer
Nobody ever asks me, “Why make paintings?” Is wanting to spend your time around attractive women who like to have sex much more difficult a desire for journalists to understand than wanting to dip wisps of horsehair into a wet lake of colored goo and smear it all over a piece of paper until it looks pretty?
As Edna walked along the street she was thinking of Robert. She was still under the spell of her infatuation. She had tried to forget him, realizing the inutility of remembering. But the thought of him was like an obsession, ever pressing itself upon her. It was not that she dwelt upon details of their acquaintance, or recalled in any special or peculiar way his personality; it was his being, his existence, which dominated her thought, fading sometimes as if it would melt into the mist of the forgotten, reviving again with an intensity which filled her with an incomprehensible longing.
— Kate Chopin, The Awakening
