i am learning to see. i don’t know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn’t stop where it once used to. i have an interior that i never knew of. everything passes into it now. i don’t know what happens there.
— The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) Rainer Maria Rilke
he felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. he was alone. the past was dead, the future was unimaginable.
— 1984 George Orwell
you must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame;
how could you become new if you haven’t first become ashes?
— Friedrich Nietzsche
the creek was flowing swiftly, an outgoing tide, a few lights streaking it, a few sounds rising, a faint ripple and a cool air.
— william carlos williams Old Doc Rivers
…how i do long for a full expression of everything that is in me, a free outpouring of everything that i feel. i have patience, i have love of men and women and children and trees - i can watch over a thing for years - in fact forever and nurse it into its full strength, but there is still a part of me that yearns for the unknown perfection - not a religious, heavenly perfection but a full-blooded earthly perfection that is fragile as all life is and as sweet.
— william carlos williams My Father, the Doctor
but if you knew you might not be able to see it again tomorrow, everything would suddenly become special and precious, wouldn’t it?
— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
