Abhiraj

“He had already packed his bags. Everything was ready, tied with string, and labeled. He planned to take the bare necessities only: typewriter, a barrel of ink, ten trunkfuls of bedside books (he knew the rest by heart), the chicken runs, the portable rabbit warren, the best armchair, the piano and, of course, drinks.”
― René Daumal, A Night of Serious Drinking

“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

“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

“The context for hope is radical uncertainty; anything could happen, and whether we act or not has everything to do with it.”
― Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline