James

“She's living on inside on what you're rotten without. That's what it is – a cannibal feast. She's a spider... she hates me; and you can scarcely dream what that hatred means. I used to think I had an inkling of the reason. It's oceans deeper than that. It just lies behind: herself against myself. Why, after all, how much do we really understand of anything? We don't even know our own histories, and not a tenth of the reasons. What has life been to me? – nothing but a trap.”
― Walter de la Mare, Out of the Deep

“Sometimes, in looking at me, her face froze into an expression of pity without a glimmer of compassion. I had often been characterized by someone – a priest, a teacher, a girl, a classmate; but in that silent look of my mother's I felt not only characterized but seen through and condemned [...] And when for the first time, after all the years at the seminary, where no one called us by anything but our family names, I heard the girl next to me at the state school address me quite casually by my first name, I took it as a characterization that exonerated me, almost as a caress. I had a feeling of relief and I can still see the sparkle of the girl's hair. And so, once I learned to decipher my mother's looks, I knew: This is no place for me.”
― Peter Handke; Ralph Manheim [trans, Repetition

“I've never had an overall strategy or a plan, you know, I've just always wanted to show off and uh you know, just try to get ahead like everybody else. Uh I did have some consuming vision, you know, I do have certain secret chambers of thought, you know, which involved uh you know, reestablishing a theocracy and being the high priest of a new invisible temple and dominate the world with a compassionate vision. But outside of that, you know, I've just tried to make a living and support my kids and send them to school and kind of keep out of trouble myself.”
― Leonard Cohen

“Truth isn't pretty, I thought, and the pursuit of it doesn't make pretty people. Truth isn't elegant; that'sjust mathematicians' sentimentality. Truth is squalid and full of blots, and you can only find it in the acumulation of dusty and broken facts, in the cellars and sewers of the human mind. History is what people hide from you, not what they're trying to show you. You search for it in the same way you sift through a landfill: for evidence of what people want to bury.”
― Hilary Mantel, Giving Up the Ghost