Abhiraj

“Ah! my brother," said a chieftain to his white
guest, "thou wilt never know the happiness of both thinking of nothing and doing nothing. This, next to sleep, is the most enchanting of all things. Thus we were before our birth, and thus we shall be after death. Thy people ... when they have finished reaping one field, they begin to plough another; and, if the day were not enough, I have seen them plough by moonlight. What is their life to ours,—the life that is as naught to them? Blind that they are, they lose it all! But we live in the present.”
― William James, On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings

“He had anticipated this and had tried to indicate to her long before how she must look at love; it was tapestry and art; the sorrow of it, the loss of it, should be part of the intelligence, and even a sad romance would be worth more than any simple bovine happiness.”
― Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss

“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

“Things change, even if you want them to stay the same. At the same time, you can try to change, but you will still remain the same.”
― Michiko Aoyama, What You Are Looking for Is in the Library