cryptocine

“Nevertheless, life is pleasant, life is tolerable. Tuesday follows Monday; then comes Wednesday. The mind grows rings; the identity becomes robust; pain is absorbed in growth. Opening and shutting, shutting and opening, with increasing hum and sturdiness, the haste and fever of youth are drawn into service until the whole being seems to expand in and out like the mainspring of a clock. How fast the stream flows from January to December! We are swept on by the torrent of things grown so familiar that they cast no shadow. We float, we float …”
― Virginia Woolf

“The monster in the streets has been to roar, while in Delhi a wiry man is saying, '... At the stroke of the midnight hour, while the world sleeps, India awakens to life and freedom...' And beneath the roar of the monster there are two more yells, cries, bellows, the howls of children arriving in the world, their unavailing protests mingling with the din of independence which hangs saffron-and-green in the night sky—'A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new; when an age ends; and when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“What goes too long unchanged destroys itself. The forest is forever because it dies and dies and so lives.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea

“I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves