Giu Giu

“Optimism nauseates me. It is perverse. Since man's fall, his proper position in the universe has been one of misery.”
― John Kennedy Toole

“There was not other sound except the husky wheezing of the clock in the hall and the sudden whirring note preparatory to the strike. It rang the hour - three o'clock - and then ticked on, chocking and gasping like a dying man who cannot catch his breath.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Jamaica Inn

“The smell of the sea pleased him so much that he wanted one day to take it in, pure and unadulterated, in such quantities that he could get drunk on it. And later, when he learned from stories how large the sea is and that you can sail upon it in ships for days on end without even seeing land, nothing pleased him more than the image of himself sitting high up in the crow's nest of the foremost mast on such a ship, gliding on through the endless smell of the sea - which really was no smell, but a breath, an exhalation of breath, the end of all smells - dissolving with pleasure in that breath.”
― Suskind Patrick, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

“The stony actors poise and pause for breath. I brought my love to bear, and then you died. It was the gangrene ate you to the bone My mother said; you died like any man. How shall I age into that state of mind? I am the ghost of an infamous suicide, My own blue razor rusting in my throat. O pardon the one who knocks for pardon at Your gate, father—your hound-bitch, daughter, friend. It was my love that did us both to death.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems