“From this new and intimate perspective, she learned a simple, obvious thing she had always known, and everyone knew; that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended.”

Source: The Visitor (2002), Ch. 40 : at ogre's gap
Context: The world stopped. She was somewhere else, learning things she had no names for. She was being instructed. Nell was in abeyance. The mind she shared was full of those treasures she had always sought, the workings of the universe, the reasons and intentions of the galaxies. Time passed forever.

Variant: Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it is always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals come easily.
Source: All the Pretty Horses

Source: City of Fallen Angels

Source: Middlesex

Early Autumn : A Story of a Lady (1926)
Context: She had turned her back upon them all and no awful fate had overtaken her; instead, she had taken a firm hold upon life and made of it a fine, even glittering, success; and this is a thing which is not easily forgiven. <!-- p. 8

Source: City of Bones

Source: Ethan Frome

Source: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Source: The Autobiography of My Mother