Bas Slootweg

“In short, to enter the lists of literature is wilfully to expose yourself to the arrows of neglect, ridicule, envy, and disappointment. Whether you write well or ill, be assured that you will not escape from blame...”
― Matthew Gregory Lewis, The Monk

“Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but 'steal' some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959

“Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Gray Life.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“Memories are the height of poetry only when they are memories of happiness. When they graze wounds over which scars have formed they become an aching pain.”
― Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov