Shaun Cox

“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“it is my experience that people are in a sense trapped within themselves, that we all view reality in particular ways and act accordingly, without the possibility of stepping outside ourselves and seeing that that reality is only one of many possible realities, and that we could just as well have acted differently, with as much justification.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Spring

“But imagine then, my little one, a state of being truly lonely, in which you don’t know anyone, don’t talk to anyone, and where nobody sees you, they merely look away. Such absolute loneliness would be impossible to live in, for why would one go on living at all? Everything within us is directed towards others. Language is directed towards others, and with it our thoughts, and with them, as the innermost existential truth, also the self. As long as the self exists in a space where there are others, even if only in the form of a voice on the radio, a face on TV, a narrator in a book, there is meaning, it can lead a meaningful life. But because the self is structured as an address to someone else, if it is deprived of others it can only be maintained by the will, and since the will of the self is merely the will for there to be others, sooner or later, if not even the slightest hope remains, the self will be extinguished.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Spring

“I understood that I had arrived there full of pride and realized that—in good faith, certainly, with affection—I had made that whole journey mainly to show her what she had lost and what I had won. But she had known from the moment I appeared, and now, risking tensions with her workmates, and fines, she was explaining to me that I had won nothing, that in the world there is nothing to win, that her life was full of varied and foolish adventures as much as mine, and that time simply slipped away without any meaning, and it was good just to see each other every so often to hear the mad sound of the brain of one echo in the mad sound of the brain of the other.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name