Sabrina

“It had seemed so safe, thinking of her. Ghost, air, nothingness, a thing you could play with easily and safely at any time of day or night, she had been that, and then suddenly she put her hand out and wrung the heart thus. ...Could things thrust their hands up and grip one; was there no safety?”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“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

“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

“Two traits of Albertine’s character came back to me at that moment, one to comfort and the other to appall me, for we can find everything in our memory: it is a kind of pharmacy or chemical laboratory, where one’s hand may fall at any moment on a sedative drug or a dangerous poison.”
― Marcel Proust, The Prisoner: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 5