Nymph arnina

“The relations between us in those latter days were peculiar. He was a man of habits, narrow and concentrated habits, and I had become one of them. As an institution I was like the violin, the shag tobacco, the old black pipe, the index books, and others perhaps less excusable. When it was a case of active work and a comrade was needed upon whose nerve he could place some reliance, my role was obvious. But apart from this I had uses. I was a whetstone for his mind. I stimulated him. He liked to think aloud in my presence. His remarks could hardly be said to be made to me--many of them would have been as appropriately addressed to his bedstead--but none the less, having formed the habit, it had become in some way helpful that I should register and interject. If I irritated him by a certain methodical slowness in my mentality, that irritation served only to make his own flame-like intuitions and impressions flash up the more vividly and swiftly. Such was my humble role in our alliance.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, Adventure of the Creeping Man

“I have always felt a strange, vague presence near me: shadowy at night, a paler whiteness in the day, and changing shapes to the point of havingg none at the moments when I feared it most. Fascinated, I found myself at a crossroad; but in front of a hole. There, night and day did not know each other. I approached a death which did not know death because it had not known life, a death without dead, an orphaned life without lives, where nothing was ever other than nothing.”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume II [IV. Yaël, V. Elya, VI. Aely, VII. El, Or the Last Book]

“At an early age I found myself facing the incomprehensible, the unthinkable, death. Ever since, I have known nothing on this earth can be shared because we own nothing. There is a word inside us stronger than all others - and more personal. A word of solitude and certainty, so buried in its night that it is barely audible to itself. A word of refusal, but also of absolute commitment, forging its bonds of silence in the emfathomable silence of the bond.
This word cannot be shared. Only sacrificed.”
― Edmond Jabès

“I am the most incurably lazy devil that ever stood in shoe leather.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle