Pragyan Khati

“How then was I to be - to be in love with him the moment he said he was with me? How was I to have an attachment at his service, as soon as it was asked for?”
― Jane Austen

“You are now nothing more than an eye. A huge staring eye which sees everything, which sees your limp body just as it sees you, looked at and looking, as if it had turned round completely in its socket and was contemplating you in silence, you, the inside of you, the dark, empty, slime-green, frightened, impotent interior of you. It looks at you and it nails you to the spot. You will never stop seeing yourself. You can do nothing, you cannot escape yourself, you cannot escape your own gaze, you never will be able to: even if you were to fall into a sleep so deep that no shock, no shout, no burning pain could rouse you, there would still be this eye, your eye, that will never close, that will never sleep.

You see yourself, you see yourself seeing yourself, you watch yourself watching yourself. Even if you were to wake up, your vision would remain the same, immutable. Even if you managed to grow thousands, billions of extra eyelids, there would still be this eye, behind, which would see you. You are not asleep but sleep will never come again. You are not awake and you will never wake up. You are not dead and even death could never set you free.”
― Georges Perec, Un homme qui dort

“Day by day the numbness crept upon him until at last the numbness seemed to be himself. He felt himself to be like the land, without identity or shape; sometimes one of the men would look at him, look through him, as if he did not exist; and he had to shake his head sharply and move an arm or a leg and glance at it to assure himself that he was visible.”
― John Williams, Butcher's Crossing

“In the other room Balazar was now talking about taking Eddie’s head as a trophy. The gunslinger found some odd comfort in this: not everything in this world was different from his own, it seemed.”
― Stephen King, The Drawing of the Three