Paul Thompson

“Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations; reality is therefore abandoned.”
― Émile Durkheim

“It seems very strange that one must turn back, and be transported to the very beginnings of history, in order to arrive at an understanding of humanity as it is at present.”
― Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life

“One does not advance when one walks toward no goal, or - which is the same thing - when his goal is infinity.”
― Émile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology

“. . . yet there is no avoiding time, the sea of time, the sea of memory and forgetfulness, the years of promise, gone and unrecoverable, of the land almost allowed to claim its better destiny, only to the claim jumped by evildoers known all too well, and taken instead and held hostage to the future we must live in now forever.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice