Adeline

“Nature in her creative dreaming, dreamt the same thing both here and there, and if one spoke of imitation, then certainly it had to be reciprocal. Should one take the children of the soil as models because they possessed the depth of organic reality, whereas the ice flowers were mere external phenomena? But as phenomena, they were the result of an interplay of matter no less complex than that found in plants. If I understood our friendly host correctly, what concerned him was the unity of animate and so-called inanimate nature, the idea that we sin against the latter if the boundary we draw between the two spheres is too rigid, when in reality it is porous, since there is no elementary capability that is reserved exclusively for living creatures or that the biologist could not likewise study on inanimate models.”
― Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus

“He remained seated on his revolving stool, turned toward us, hands between his knees, in a position the same as ours, and with a few words concluded his lecture on the question of why Beethoven had not written a third movement to Opus 111. We had needed only to hear the piece, he said, to be able to answer the question ourselves. A third movement? A new beginning, after that farewell? A return — after that parting? Impossible! What had happened was that the sonata had found its ending in its second, enormous movement, had ended never to return. And when he said, “the sonata,” he did not mean just this one, in C minor, but he meant the sonata per se, as a genre, as a traditional artform — it had been brought to an end, to its end, had fulfilled its destiny, reached a goal beyond which it could not go; canceling and resolving itself, it had taken its farewell - the wave of goodbye from the D-G-G motif, consoled melodically by the C-sharp, was a farewell in that sense, too, a farewell as grand as the work, a farewell from the sonata.”
― Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus

“Imagine there is a bank account that credits your account each morning with $86,400. It carries over no balance from day to day. Every evening the bank deletes whatever part of the balance you failed to used during the day. What would you do? Draw out every cent, of course? Each of us has such a bank, it's name is time. Every morning, it credits you 86,400 seconds. Every night it writes off at a lost, whatever of this you failed to invest to a good purpose. It carries over no balance. It allows no over draft. Each day it opens a new account for you. Each night it burns the remains of the day. If you fail to use the day's deposits, the loss is yours. There is no drawing against "tomorrow". You must live in the present on today's deposits. Invest it so as to get from it the utmost in health, happiness, and health. The clock is running. Make the most of today.”
― Marc Levy, If Only It Were True