Virginia

“What do you think spies are: priests, saints, and martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists, and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London balancing the rights and wrongs? I’d have killed Mundt if I could, I hate his guts; but not now. It so happens that they need him. They need him so that the great moronic mass that you admire can sleep soundly in their beds at night. They need him for the safety of ordinary, crummy people like you and me.”
― John le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

“I am drowning, my dear, in seas of fire.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“The things I know, every man can know, but, oh, my heart is mine alone!”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther and Selected Writings

“Dress suitably in short skirts and strong boots, leave your jewels in the bank and buy a revolver.”
― Constance Markievicz