“But I have found an answer in those eyes
That are impatient to be gone.”
— W.B. Yeats, 'The Tower'
“I shall have to never listen to anything else but this again forever.”
— William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
“I have seen the darkness creep along the wall
I have heard my Madness chatter before day
I have seen the world roll up into a ball
Then suddenly dissolve and fall away.”
— T.S. Eliot, 'Prufrock's Pervigilium'
“Is this a fragment of a real memory or has time folded back on itself? I cannot tell.”
— Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World [transl. Alfred Birnbaum]
“A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy, since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land.”
— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus [transl. Justin O’Brien]
“you can scream your throat raw out here
and the landscape won’t give a shiver”
— Dan Dietz, Americamisfit
“Ah, ye admonitions and warnings! why stay ye not when ye come? But rather are ye predictions than warnings, ye shadows! Yet not so much predictions from without, as verifications of the foregoing things within. For with little external to constrain us, the innermost necessities in our being, these still drive us on.”
— Herman Melville, Moby Dick
“In order to get to the truth about myself, I must have contact with another person. The other is indispensable to my own existence, as well as to my knowledge about myself.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Humanism of Existentialism” [transl. Bernard Frechtman]
“People like they historical shit in a certain way. They like it to unfold the way they folded it up. Neatly like a book. Not raggedy and bloody and screaming.”
— Suzan-Lori Parks, Topdog/Underdog
“Sometimes a man seems to reverse himself so that you would say, ‘He can’t do that. It’s out of character.’ Maybe it’s not. It could be just another angle, or it might be that the pressures above or below have changed his shape.”
— John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent
“One’s outer life passes in a solitude haunted by the masks of others; one’s inner life passes in a solitude hounded by the masks of oneself.”
— Eugene O’Neill
“I just try to keep track of my own movement these days. That’s enough. Have you ever tried that? To follow yourself around? Like a spy. You can wind up anywhere. It’s amazing. Like, just now I caught myself shaving. I was right over there. Shaving my face. I didn’t know I was doing that until just now. It’s kinda scary, ya know. … I mean there’s a possibility that you could do something you didn’t even know about.”
— Sam Shepard, A Lie of the Mind
“Rocking on the sea, looking for my soul,
dead man’s blood from an old boat hole.
Sail to the left, sail to the right,
sail to the end in the cold moon light.”
— Naomi Wallace, The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek
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