Sabrina

“A great brush swept smooth across his mind, sweeping across it moving branches, children's voices, the shuffle of feet, and people passing, and humming traffic, rising and falling traffic. Down, down he sank into the plumes and feathers of sleep, sank, and was muffled over.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“How," he pondered, "how was my thought any stupider than all the other thoughts and theories that have been swarming and colliding in the world, ever since the world began?”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“...The asses who might really think that in the starlight of eternity, my [and her] conjunction, somewhere in North America, in the nineteenth century represented but one trillionth of a trillionth part of a pinpoint planet's significance can bray... because the rapture of her identity, placed under the microscope of reality, shows a complex system of those subtle bridges which the senses traverse—laughing, embraced, throwing flowers in the air—between membrane and brain, and which always was and is a form of memory, even at the moment of its perception.

I am weak. I write badly.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

“He had (like a calculator who means to do nothing else until such time as he has resolved his problem) put down beside him the cigar that, a short while ago, he had had in his mouth, but which he no longer had the necessary freedom of mind to smoke. On remarking the two crouched divinities borne on its arms by the chair set facing, you might've thought the Baron was seeking to solve the riddle of the Sphinx...

Now, the figure to which M. de Charlus was applying, and with such intensity, all his mental powers, was that proposed to him by the lineaments of the young Marquis de Surgis' face. It seemed to be, so profound was M. de Charlus' absorption before it, some heraldic motto, some conundrum, some problem in algebra, the riddle or formula of which he was seeking to penetrate.”
― Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah