“They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbed word. To-day, wrapped in the complacent armour of approaching middle age, the infinitesimal pricks of day by day brush one but lightly and are soon forgotten, but then—how a careless word would linger, becoming a fiery stigma, and how a look, a glance over a shoulder, branded themselves as things eternal. ― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca. (Victor Gollancz 1938)

Who’s there? A piece of graffiti in spiral lamplight
says “failure makes possible.” Footsteps in reverberating
stutter: this unended search to be satisfied —
hour-by-hour circling the périphérique. A sameness of things
in the same places, the grey tide, the discomfort of sleep.

— Louis Armand, from “Léon Paul Fargue,” Blackbox Manifold, Issue 11, (Winter 2013)”