Ruth

“There
he comes now, a hard pen
scraping in his head;
the nib filed on a salt wind
and dipped in the keening sea.”
― Seamus Heaney, Death of a Naturalist

“I did not bring a television set out here with me, and I regret it sometimes when the evenings get long, but my idea was that living alone you can soon get stuck to those flickering images and to the chair you will sit on far into the night, and then time merely passes as you let others do the moving. I do not want that. I will keep myself company.”
― Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses

“For a moment I had an inkling of what it might be like if instead of two people in the World there were thousands.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“Landt’s observations were meticulous and he is one of the few outsiders to record the unique way in which the Faroese measured time. They divided the day into what he called ökter – eight three-hour portions named after points of the compass. Twelve midnight was called ‘north’ while twelve noon was referred to as ‘south’. Six am became simply ‘east’ and six pm was ‘west’. Ninety-minute intervals were ‘half-eighths’, so that ten thirty pm would be north-north-west.”
― Tim Ecott, The Land of Maybe: A Faroe Islands Year