Reid

“I guess that, someday, I’ll conceive the child that Shaka wanted to kill so that she might become a person. Maybe that someday is – now.”
― Saou Ichikawa, Hunchback

“I bore no responsibility in any of this. With my reduced muscular strenght, I couldn't afford to bear any.”
― Saou Ichikawa, Hunchback

“Very swiftly I calculated: forty-seven minus forty-four equals three; twenty-two plus three equals twenty-five. He was still facing me across the table. He smiled at me slowly, lazily. He had plenty of time. A lifetime. A lifetime throughout which his chest would go on and on rising and falling, throughout which he would be perfectly free to talk and smile and drink menthes à l’eau in the summer heat. I hated him. I hated him for being twenty-five and for throwing his young life in my face, like a provocation. The café reeled, the waiter, holding his tray high in the air, multiplied between me and the door, the door was fleeing, hiding, stealing along the walls ...

A voice behind me was thundering: ‘Waiter! Somebody was still clamouring for the waiter, and it was a
voice choking with anguish. In the shadowy room, expressionless faces were bobbing about with grotesque solemnity, as though suspended from invisible wires. The scream which I let out, and which I alone heard, died among the street noises. I stopped running. I walked, like everyone else. I drew breath. And a thought occurred to me, the thought shared by everyone else: ‘‘Isn’t it hot!”
― Anna Langfus, The Lost Shore

“Dreams of other planets arise out of weariness. I'll be frank and say that the idea of escape isn't crazy or shameful. We want to find what we're searching for—and that is to be freed of ourselves. That's why there is such a feeling of intoxication when we find love, and when it's missing why there's such huge despair. When love is another planet, we collapse in it, free of the emptiness of our strumming and unhappiness. In fact, in love we stop being ourselves.”
― Georges Bataille, Guilty