Priya

“Some attribute had departed from her, the permanence of which had been essential to keep her a woman. Such is frequently the fate, and such the stern development, of the feminine character and person, when the woman has encountered, and lived through, an experience of peculiar severity. If she be all tenderness, she will die. If she survive, the tenderness will either be crushed out of her, or—and the outward semblance is the same—crushed so deeply into her heart that it can never show itself more.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“Salander leaned back against the pillow and followed the conversation with a smile. She wondered why she, who had such difficulty talking about herself with people of flesh and blood, could blithely reveal her most intimate secrets to a bunch of completely unknown freaks on the Internet.”
― Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

“So if we're all quarks and electrons ..." he begins.

What?"

We could make love and it would be nothing more than quarks and electrons rubbing together."

Better than that," I say. "Nothing really 'rubs together' in the microscopic world. Matter never really touches other matter, so we could make love without any of our atoms touching at all. Remember that electrons sit on the outside of atoms, repelling other electrons. So we could make love and actually repel each other at the same time.”
― Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr. Y

“Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes.”
― Clarice Lispector