Francesca

“The sun sank with a sob and darkness waded in from all horizons so that the sky contracted and there was no more light left in the world, when, at this very moment of annihilation, the moon, as though she had been waiting for her cue, sailed up the night.”
― Mervyn Peake, Titus Alone

“Something else an academic education will do for you. If you go along with it any considerable distance, it will begin to give you an idea what size mind you have. What’ll fit and, maybe, what it won’t. After a while, you’ll have an idea what kind of thoughts your mind should be wearing. For one thing, it may save you an extraordinary amount of time trying on ideas that won’t suit you, aren’t becoming to you. You’ll begin to know your true measurements and dress your mind accordingly.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. ”
― Alfred Lord Tennyson

“We often told ourselves off for wasting time in chairs, fully dressed, talking, when we could be doing the same, lying down in bed, face to face and naked. That precious time before love-making is ill-served by the pseudo-clinical term, ‘foreplay’. The world would narrow and deepen, our voices would sink into the warmth of our bodies, the conversation became associative and unpredictable. Everything was touch and breath. Certain simple phrases came to me which I didn’t say out loud because they sounded so banal - Here we are, or, This again or Yes, this. Like a moment in a recurring dream, these spacious, innocent minutes were forgotten until we were back inside them. When we were, our lives returned to the essentials and began again. When we fell silent, we would lie so close we were mouth to mouth, delaying the union which bound us all the more because of this prelude.”
― Ian McEwan, Enduring Love