Beth

“All that matters to me is to know that I have a brother. I cannot explain the immensity of love I have for that boy who ran. The love that one has for simulacra. For that which is not visible, but has light. For a little boy with a passionate wish to die.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, S. S. Proleterka

“I think, among other things, that a set hour is full of peril; what one wants is the sudden desultory talk,—the look-up from the book one is reading, the burst of argument between two regions of silence.”
― Vita Sackville-West, Love Letters: Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West

“I declared myself, I declared my love. More than to her I spoke to the landscape. The train looked like a toy, it left. ‘Ne sois pas triste.’ She left me a note. I had lost what was most important in my life, the sky was still blue, oblivious, everything yearned for peace and happiness, the landscape was idyllic, like idyllic, desperate adolescence. The landscape seemed to protect us, the small white houses of Appenzell, the fountain, the sign Töchterinstitut, it was as if the place hadn’t been affected by human distortions. Can one feel disorientated in an idyll? An atmosphere of catastrophe covered the land-scape. The irremediable came home to me in one of the most beautiful, transparent days of the year.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline

“There are gates the bravest horse can't jump. If wishes were horses, I'd have a whole herd of them, roan and buckskin, lovely wild horses, never bridled, never broken, galloping over the plains past red mesas and blue mountains. But cowards ride rocking horses made of wood with painted eyes, and back and forth they go, back and forth in one place on the playroom floor, back and forth, and all the plains and mesas and mountains are only in the rider's eyes.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes