Neila

“La beauté sera CONVULSIVE ou ne sera pas.”
― André Breton, Nadja

“Who has not observed this fact with women, or even with men, endowed with a remarkable intelligence, but afflicted by nervousness? When they are happy, at peace, content with their surroundings, they cause us to admire their precious gifts; it is literally the truth that speaks through their mouths. A migraine, some small puncturing of their amour-propre is enough to change everything. The luminous intelligence, abrupt, convulsive, shrunken, now reflects only a self that is irritated, suspicious, coquettish, doing all it can to be unattractive.”
― Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah

“The weaver-god, he weaves; and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal voice; and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened; and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through it. For even so it is in all material factories. The spoken words that are inaudible among the flying spindles; those same words are plainly heard without the walls, bursting from the opened casements. Thereby have villainies been detected. Ah, mortal! then, be heedful; for so, in all this din of the great world’s loom, thy subtlest thinkings may be overheard afar.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?

But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God- so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing- straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale