Yvonne

“To do justice to the figure of Kafka it its purity and peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing; it is the purity and beauty of failure. The circumstances of this failure are manifold. One is tempted to say: once he was certain of eventual failure, everything worked out for him en route as in a dream. There is nothing more memorable that the fervor with which Kafka emphasized his failure.”
― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

“The sky was filled with fat stars, swollen from the long night. The moon had risen briefly and then slipped out of sight. It was one of those sad moons that no one looks at or pays attention to. It had hung there a while, misshapen, not shedding any light, and then gone to hide behind the hills.”
― Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo

“They knew now that if there is one thing one can always yearn for, and sometimes attain, it is human love.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time