Robin

“The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.”
― E.L. Doctorow

“I didn’t want any new clothes at all; because if I had to look ugly anyway, I wanted to at least be comfortable. I let the awful clothes affect even my posture, walked around with my back bowed, my shoulders drooping, my hands and arms all over the place. I was afraid of mirrors, because they showed an inescapable ugliness.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923

“I felt in harmony with the disharmony of others, myself, and the world.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“While the Enlightenment was a family of philosophers, it was something more as well: it was a cultural climate, a world in which the philosophers acted, from which they noisily rebelled and quietly drew many of their ideas, and on which they attempted to impose their program.”
― Peter Gay, The Enlightenment, Volume 1: The Rise of Modern Paganism