Abhiraj

“Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought—these are the artist's highest joy. And our solitary protagonist felt in himself at this moment power to command and wield a thought that thrilled with emotion, an emotion as precise and concentrated as thought: namely, that nature herself shivers with ecstasy when the mind bows down in homage before beauty.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice & Seven Other Stories

“I listened to her string of non sequiturs, entranced. I understood what she was telling us. There was no coherence. Nothing led to anything else. There were only jagged moments of half comprehension. Nothing could be known. We were all incomplete, unfinished. That was life until completed by death. And none of us could complete our own story because we would no longer be present. We were all frozen in our railway carriages waiting for another to finish our tale, to complete us, if anyone cared to do so. Otherwise, unfinishedness was our inescapable fate.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories

“In reality, the true painter, as you know, possesses within himself—in his muscles, his sensibility, even in his thinking—the golden number or numbers and the laws of color; he possesses them, he has earned them, he makes them live through everything he experiences and sees, not just on the canvas: his work is therefore both useful and universal.”
― René Daumal, A Night of Serious Drinking

“Therefore he was very far from regarding himself as a paradigm, a pattern or example to be followed; but, condemned to be the exception, he was able at last to comfort himself with the thought that as such he was a "corrective" and, alas, a "sacrifice".”
― Walter Lowrie, A Short Life of Kierkegaard