Morgan Condict

“He knew he should go to see her again, according to her invitation. Those earnest men he read of, the saints, whom Sue, with gentle irreverence, called his demi-gods, would have shunned such encounters if they doubted their own strength. But he could not. He might fast and pray during the whole interval, but the human was more powerful in him than the Divine.”
― Thomas Hardy

“Many terribly quiet customers exist but none more
terribly quiet than Man
his footsteps pass so perilously soft across the sea
in marble winter
up the stiff blue waves and every Tuesday
down he grinds the unastonishable earth
with horse and shatter

shatters too the cheeks of birds and traps them in his forest headlights
salty silvers roll into his net, he weaves it just for that,
this terribly quiet customer
he dooms
animals and mountains technically
by yoke he makes the bull bend, the horse to its knees...”
― Sophocles Carson Anne

“Tereza keeps appearing before my eyes. I see her sitting on the stump petting Karenin’s head and ruminating on mankind’s debacles. Another image also comes to mind: Nietzsche leaving his hotel in Turin. Seeing a horse and a coachman beating it with a whip, Nietzsche went up to the horse and, before the coachman’s very eyes, put his arms around the horse’s neck and burst into tears.

That took place in 1889, when Nietzsche, too, had removed himself from the world of people. In other words, it was at the time when his mental illness had just erupted. But for that very reason I feel his gesture has broad implications: Nietzsche was trying to apologize to the horse for Descartes. His lunacy (that is, his final break with mankind) began at the very moment he burst into tears over the horse.

And that is the Nietzsche I love, just as I love Tereza with the mortally ill dog resting his head on her lap. I see them one next to the other: both stepping down from the road along which mankind, “the master and proprietor of nature,” marches onward.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.”
― Robert Hass