Mara

“It’s hard to talk about what you believe while you are
believing it. Fervor reduces thought to shorthand and
all we get is an icon.”
― Richard Siken, War of the Foxes

“Would it have been worthwhile...
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: "That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Other Poems

“The youth of America is their oldest tradition. It has been going on now for three hundred years.”
― Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance

“Once he went into the mountains on a clear, sunny day, and wandered about for a long time with a tormenting thought that refused to take shape. Before him was the shining sky, below him the lake, around him the horizon, bright and infinite, as if it went on forever. For a long time he looked and suffered. He remembered now how he had stretched out his arms to that bright, infinite blue and wept. What had tormented him was that he was a total stranger to it all. What was this banquet, what was this great everlasting feast, to which he had long been drawn, always, ever since childhood, and which he could never join? Every morning the same bright sun rises; every morning there is a rainbow over the waterfall; every evening the highest snowcapped mountain, there, far away, at the edge of the sky, burns with a crimson flame; every little fly that buzzes near him in a hot ray of sunlight participates in this whole chorus: knows its place, loves it, and is happy; every little blade of grass grows and is happy! And everything has its path, and everything knows its path, goes with a song and comes back with a song; only he knows nothing, understands nothing, neither people nor sounds, a stranger to everything and a castaway.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot