Rob

“I know a rock in a highland's ravine,
On which only eagles might ever be seen,
But a black wooden cross o'er a precipice reigns,
It rots and it ages from tempests and rains.

And many years have gone without any hints,
From times when it was seen from faraway hills.
And its every arm is raised up to the sky,
As if catching clouds or going to fly.

Oh, if I were able to rise there and stay,
Then how I'd cry there and how I'd pray;
And then I would throw off real life's chains
And live as a brother of tempests and rains!”
― Mikhail Lermontov

“It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Days and nights passed over this despair of flesh, but one morning he awoke, looked (with calm now) at the blurred things that lay about him, and felt, inexplicably, the way one might feel upon recognizing a melody or a voice, that all this had happened to him before and that he had faced it with fear but also with joy and hopefulness and curiosity. Then he descended into his memory, which seemed to him endless, and managed to draw up from that vertigo the lost remembrance that gleamed like a coin in the rain - perhaps because he had never really looked at it except (perhaps) in a dream.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

“The worst part is wondering how you’ll find the strength tomorrow to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where you’ll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows. And maybe it’s treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn’t enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Celine