Julian

“In a country town I wouldn’t be able to find anymore, the sloping streets are old and the houses are decked with slate. Rain runs along the sculpted pilotis, and its droplets all fall in the selfsame place, with the selfsame sound. The round little windows have sunken into the walls, as if to keep from being struck. There is nothing brave in these streets, save for the ivy above the doors and the moss atop the walls: the ivy’s dark and shiny leaves bare their teeth, and the moss dares consume all the large stones that sit outside its yellow velvet – but the people here are as fleeting as the shadow of rising smoke.”
― Marcel Schwob, The King in the Golden Mask

“Do I walk? Have I feet still? I raise my eyes, I let them move round, and turn myself with them, one circle, one circle, and I stand in the midst. All is as usual. Only the Militiaman Stanislaus Katczinsky has died.

Then I know nothing more.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“Grant [....] had no right to exist. He should have been extinct for ages. [....] That, two thousand years after Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, a man like Grant should be called — and should actually and truly be — the highest product of the most advanced evolution, made evolution ludicrous. [....] The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant, was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin.”
― Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

“Their souls had espoused each other, perhaps before they even felt the force of the feelings which bound them together.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Eugénie Grandet