IA

“You go to class and discuss famous poems. The poems are full of swans, gorse, blackberries, leopards, elderflowers, mountains, orchards, moonlight, wolves, nightingales, cherry blossoms, bog oak, lily-pads, honeybees. Even the brand-new ones are jam-packed with nature. It’s like the poets are not living in the same world as you. You put up your hand and say isn’t it weird that poets just keep going around noticing nature and not ever noticing that nature is shrinking? To read these poems you would think the world was as full of nature as it ever was even though in the last forty years so many animals and habitats have been wiped out. How come they don’t notice that? How come they don’t notice everything that’s been annihilated? If they’re so into noticing things? I look around and all I see is the world being ruined. If poems were true they’d just be about walking through a giant graveyard or a garbage dump. The only place you find nature is in poems, it’s total bullshit. Even the sensitive people are fucking liars, you say. No, you don’t, you sit there in silence like always.”
― Paul Murray, The Bee Sting

“Maybe that’s how it will go – instead of one definitive cataclysm, a series of ‘anomalies’, each time lasting longer, with the stretches of what you call normal life becoming further and further apart, until one day it dawns on you that this is normal life now...”
― Paul Murray, The Bee Sting

“Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living! You said I killed you - haunt me, then! The murdered haunt their murderers. I believe - I know that ghosts wandered on earth. Be with me always - take any form - drive me mad! only not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I live without my life! I live without my soul!”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“He is not to them what he is to me," I thought: "he is not of their kind. I believe he is of mine - I am sure he is - I feel akin to him - I understand the language of his countenance and movements: though rank and wealth sever us widely, I have something in my brain and heart, in my blood and nerves, that assimilates me mentally to him. Did I say, a few days since, that i had nothing to do with him but to receive my salary at his hands? Did I forbid myself to think of him in any other light than as a paymaster? Blasphemy against nature! Every good, true, vigorous feeling I have gathers impulsively round him. I know I must conceal my sentiments: I must smother hope; I must remember that he cannot care much for me. For when I say that I am of his kind, I do not mean that I have his force to influence, and his spell to attract; I mean only that I have certain tastes and feelings in common with him. I must, then, repeat continually that we are for ever sundered - and yet, while I breathe and think, I must love him.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre