Moomin279

“All I could do was look helplessly on. Those who suffer shall suffer. Those who fall shall fall.
It had nothing to do with me, it was just the way the world was.”
― Osamu Dazai, Self-Portraits: Tales from the Life of Japan's Great Decadent Romantic

“People imagined poems were wispy things, she said, frilly things, like lace doilies. But in fact they were like claws, like the metal spikes mountaineers use to find purchase on the sheer face of a glacier. By writing a poem, the lady poets could break through the slippery, nothingy surface of the life they were enclosed in, to the passionate reality that beat beneath it. Instead of falling down the sheer face, they could haul themselves up, line by line, until at last they stood on top of the mountain. And then maybe, just maybe, they might for an instant see the world as it really is.”
― Paul Murray, The Bee Sting

“Mira was scowling. It annoyed her, almost as a matter of principle, that anyone of this man's age, race, gender, wealth, and associated privilege should have used his power--allegedly--for good, should have built his business--allegedly--up from the ground, from nothing, and should possess--allegedly--the very kind of rural authenticity that she herself most envied and pursued. Even more annoying was the fact that she had never heard of the orange-fronted parakeet, which she now searched for, still scowling, in a separate tab. Like all self-mythologising rebels, Mira preferred enemies to rivals, and often turned her rivals into enemies, the better to disdain them as secret agents of the status quo. But because this was not a conscious habit, she experienced only a vague feeling of righteous defiance as, unable to dismiss Owen Darvish, she told herself instead that she disliked him.”
― Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

“comedy was about what was wrong with the world—people laughed because something was too big, or too small, or too much, or not enough. Quirks and exaggerations were the essence of parody. Irony and discomfort the grist for humor.”
― Gilda Radner, It's Always Something: Twentieth Anniversary Edition