I have always had a great need for solitude.  I require huge swathes of loneliness and when I do not have it, which has been the case for the last five years, my frustration can sometimes become almost panicked, or aggressive.  And when what has kept me going for the whole of my adult life, the ambition to write something exceptional one day, is threatened in this way my one thought, which gnaws at me like a rat, is that I have to escape.  Time is slipping away from me, running through my fingers like sand while I . . . do what?  Clean floors, wash clothes, make dinner, wash up, go shopping, play with the children in the play areas, bring them home, undress them, bathe them, look after them until it is bedtime, tuck them in, hang some clothes to dry, fold others, and put them away, tidy up, wipe tables, chairs and cupboards.  It is a struggle, and even though it is not heroic, I am up against a superior force, for no matter how much housework I do at home the rooms are littered with mess and junk, and the children, who are taken care of every waking minute, are more stubborn than I have ever known children to be, at times it is nothing less than bedlam, perhaps we have never managed to find the necessary balance between distance and intimacy, which of course becomes increasingly important the more personality is involved.  And there is quite a bit of that here.

--Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle

     And in that moment, he was finally able to accept it all.  In the deepest recesses of his soul, Tsukuru Tazaki understood.  One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone.  They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds.  Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility.  There is no silence without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no acceptance without a passage through acute loss.  That is what lies at the root of true harmony.

--Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

I will give you one of them, she told Tsukuru. My body or my heart. But you can't have both.

     But he had never once personally experienced those emotions.  He'd never seriously wished for talents and gifts he didn't have, or been passionately in love.  Never had he longed for, or envied, anyone.  Not to say there weren't things he was dissatisfied with, things about himself he found lacking.  If he had to, he could have listed them.  It wouldn't have been a massive list, but not just a couple of lines, either.  But those dissatisfactions and deficiencies stayed inside him--they weren't the type of emotions that motivated him to go out, somewhere else in search of answers.  At least until then. 
     In this dream, though, he burned with desire for a woman.  It wasn't clear who she was.  She was just there.  And she had a special ability to separate her body and her heart.  I will give you one of them, she told Tsukuru.  My body or my heart.  But you can't have both.  You need to chose one or the other, right now.  I'll give the other part to someone else, she said.  But Tsukuru wanted all of her.  He wasn't about to hand over half to another man.  He couldn't stand that.  If that's how it is, he wanted to tell her, I don't need either one.  But he couldn't say it.  He was stymied, unable to go forward, unable to go back.

--Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (trans. Philip Gabriel)

The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.

     "What baby?"
     "She left me."
     "Aw, girl.  Don't cry."
     "She was my best thing."
     Paul D sits down in the rocking chair and examines the quilt patched in carnival colors.  His hands are limp between his knees.  There are too many things to feel about this woman.  His head hurts.  Suddenly he remembers Sixo trying to describe what he felt about the Thirty-Mile Woman.  "She is a friend of my mind.  She gather me, man.  The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.  It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind."
     He is staring at the quilt but he is thinking about her wrought-iron back; the delicious mouth still puffy at the corner from from Ella's fist.  The mean black eyes.  The wet dress steaming before the fire.  Her tenderness about his neck jewelry--its three wands, like attentive baby rattlers, curving two feet into the air.  How she never mentioned or looked at it, so he did not have to feel the shame of being collared like a beast.  Only this woman Sethe could have left him his manhood like that.  He wants me to put his story next to hers.
     "Sethe," he says, "me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody.  We need some kind of tomorrow."
     He leans over and takes her hand.  With the other he touches her face.  "You your best thing, Sethe.  You are."  His holding fingers and holding hers.
     "Me?  Me?"

--Toni Morrison, Beloved