Shawn

“Perhaps superhuman beings used us as we used animals, for food and work— a different sort of food and work. Perhaps they used our physical or mental forces in some way. We killed animals’ bodies. Perhaps they killed or tampered with people’s minds ; so that they went mad. We were being put to work, harnessed— or some of us were: the ones they wanted.

And these superior beings might be used by beings superior to them— like that Chinese picture of everything preying on everything, from the lowest upwards. . . . But, used or not used, he was not going on any longer...

("The Shadow")”
― E.H. Visiak

“During my early youth I carried all my earthly goods in my pants and coat pockets, that is when I had a coat, because I had to be ready to travel at any hour no matter where I happened to be, mostly on account of merciless truant officers. Since then, having become in the meantime well-to-do, I carried all my earthly riches in that shaky cardboard box. It makes you wonderfully independent.

Even had these good men not asked for it, even had they not so highly solicited my medical knowledge, I would still have taken the medicine box along with me. This I did entirely instinctively and out of long and often very bitter experience. For it had often happened to me in the past that, when I thought of leaving my residence for only one hour, upon regaining full consciousness I discovered that I had landed on a different continent. Through such experiences one learns to become careful, so that toothbrush, shaving kit and a little pocket compass were constantly buttoned up inside my back pants pocket. How would I know where I might land if I flew away with these three nightbirds? ("Midnight Call")”
― B. Traven, The Night Visitor and Other Stories

“Then Mr. Pratt handed me a map.

The less said about this map, the better. You can put anything you like upon a map: roads, rivers, villages, towns, grasslands, water pools, mountain passes, and plenty more. Paper is patient, it won’t refuse anything; but though a river or a bridge appears on a map it doesn’t mean that you’re going to find it where it is supposed to be. (The Cattle Drive)”
― B. Traven, The Night Visitor and Other Stories

“The moon, like a gardenia in the night’s button-hole—but no! why should a writer never be able to mention the moon without likening her to something else—usually something to which she bears not the faintest resemblance?... The moon, looking like nothing whatsoever but herself, was engaged in her old and futile endeavour to mark the hours correctly on the sun-dial at the centre of the lawn.”
― Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson