Alex

“Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely he mutely craved to adore.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“As Raimbaut dragged a dead man along he thought, ‘Oh
corpse, I have come rushing here only to be dragged along by the
heels like you. What is this frenzy that drives me, this mania for
battle and for love, when seen from the place where your staring
eyes gaze and your flung-back head knocks over stones? It’s that
I think of, oh corpse, it’s that you make me think of: but does anything
change? Nothing. No other days exist but these of ours
before the tomb, both for us the living and for you the dead. May
it be granted me not to waste them, not to waste anything of what
I am, of what I could be: to do deeds helpful to the Frankish cause:
to embrace, to be embraced by, proud Bradamante. I hope you
spent your days no worse, oh corpse. Anyway to you the dice have already shown their numbers. For me they are still whirling in the
box. And I love my own disquiet, corpse, not your peace.”
― Italo Calvino

“-that unsleeping care which must have known that it could permit itself but one mistake; that alertness for measuring and weighing event against eventuality, circumstance against human nature, his own fallible judgement and mortal clay against not only human but natural forces, choosing and discarding, compromising with his dream and his ambition like you must with the horse which you take across country, over timber, which you control only through your ability to keep the animal from realizing that actually you cannot, that actually it is the stronger.”
― William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

“Hush, now", she said, stroking his head. "Hush. Dilsey got you." But he bellowed slowly, abjectly, without tears; the grave hopeless sound of all voiceless misery under the sound.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury