Carmelia

“He was so terrible that he was no longer terrible, only dehumanized.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“She had somehow given over the thinking to him, and in his absences her every action seemed automatically governed by what he would like, so that now she felt inadequate to match her intentions against his. Yet think she must; she knew at last the number on the dreadful door of fantasy, the threshold to the escape that was no escape; she knew that for her greatest sin now and in the future was to delude herself. It had been a long lesson but she had learned it. Either you think—or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”
― Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

“They muddy the water, to make it seem deep.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche