"She considered writing to him now asking him if he too had felt like this, as thought he had been shut away somewhere and was trapped in a place where there was nothing.  It was like hell, she thought, because she could see no end to it, and to the feeling that came with it, but the torment was strange, it was all in her mind, it was like the arrival of night if you knew that you would never see anything in daylight again.  She did not know what she was going to do."
-Brooklyn by Colm Toibin

"Eilis slipped away, glad no one had noticed that she had not spoken once at the meal.  She wondered if she could go out now, do anything rather than face her tomb of a bedroom and all the thoughts that would come when she lay awake and all the thoughts that would come when she slept.  She stood in the hall, and then turned upstairs, realizing that she was afraid too of the outside, and even if she were not she would have no idea where to go at this time of the evening.  She hated this house, she thought, its smells, its noises, its colors.  She was already crying as she went up the stairs.  She knew that as long as the others were discussing their wardrobes in the kitchen below, she would be able to cry as loudly as she pleased without their hearing her."
-Brooklyn by Colm Toibin

"I grip my knees with both hands and try to hold my body together.  I'm about to rip at the seams; if I cry, everything inside me is going to fly out.  When someone opens the door, pieces of me will be borne away on the wind.  I'll never be able to find all of them.  I'll never be whole.  I'll never be whole."
-Something Real by Heather Demetrois

"Rune never said anything about it.  But to anyone who had known him a long time, it was as if he shrank a couple of inches in the years that followed.  As if he sort of crumpled with a deep sigh and never really breathed properly again."
-A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman