Cassandra

“But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”
― T.S. Eliot

“In one sense, at any rate, it is more valuable to read bad literature than good literature. Good literature may tell us the mind of one man; but bad literature may tell us the mind of many men. A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. It does much more than that, it tells us the truth about its readers; and, oddly enough, it tells us this all the more the more cynical and immoral be the motive of its manufacture. The more dishonest a book is as a book the more honest it is as a public document. A sincere novel exhibits the simplicity of one particular man; an insincere novel exhibits the simplicity of mankind. The pedantic decisions and definable readjustments of man may be found in scrolls and statute books and scriptures; but men's basic assumptions and everlasting energies are to be found in penny dreadfuls and halfpenny novelettes. Thus a man, like many men of real culture in our day, might learn from good literature nothing except the power to appreciate good literature. But from bad literature he might learn to govern empires and look over the map of mankind.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

“Perhaps this is what it means to go mad: to be emptied and to be aware of the emptiness.”
― David Foster Wallace

“The way Lillian says it is hungry, like she’s waiting for something to be revealed, and I wonder if maybe that’s the real difference between us—that when she pulls back the curtain and stares into the blackness behind it, it’s just one more way of testing herself. Like some game you can never win, because even if you face all the shocking realities and the horrors of the world, once you’ve seen that kind of awfulness, you can never un-see it. You have to carry it around with you forever.”
― Brenna Yovanoff, Paper Valentine