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

“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