Nila

“He thrust his shoulders back and spoke in a whisper that sounded like the hiss of a snake.
‘Yes, the very battle between good and evil, played out even in the lowliest of lives like yours. Witches killing dogs because they did not get their favourite drink.”
― Sara Pascoe, Being a Witch, and Other Things I Didn't Ask For

“In this position, my face was within a few feet of the surface of the quicksand. The sight of it so near me, still disturbed at intervals by its hideous shivering fit, shook my nerves for the moment. A horrible fancy that the dead woman might appear on the scene of her suicide, to assist my search-- an unutterable dread of seeing her rise through the heaving surface of the sand, and point to the place--forced itself into my mind, and turned me cold in the warm sunlight. I own I closed my eyes at the moment when the point of the stick first entered the quicksand.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone

“Trees are made of air, primarily. When they are burned, they go back to air, and in the flaming heat is released the flaming heat of the Sun which was bound in to convert the air into tree. And in the ash is the small remnant of the part which did not come from air, that came from the solid earth, instead.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“By dread things I am compelled. I know that. I see the trap closing. I know what I am. But while life is in me I will not stop this violence. No. Oh my friends who is there to comfort me? Who understands? Leave me be, let me go, do not soothe me. This is a knot no one can untie. There will be no rest, there is no retrieval. No number exists for griefs like these.”
― Sophocles, Electra