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“The gas lamps in the street went out. Shadows crept along the walls. So there were ghosts. During the night they came flying here and crouched over the books. Then they read. They needed no light, they had such big eyes. Now he would not touch a single book on the upper shelves, nor on the lower ones either. He crept under the counter and his teeth chattered. Ten thousand books and a ghost crouching over each one. That was why it was so quiet. Sometimes he heard them turn over a page. They read as fast as he did himself. He might have grown used to them, but there were ten thousand of them and perhaps one of them would bite.”
― Elias Canetti, Auto-da-Fé

“...we proletariat will never be anything but cynical of capitalist schemes.”
― Hu Anyan, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing

“[The State] is a brute force; obedience is a necessity not a duty. Or rather, one has a duty towards oneself not to knock one's head up against the brick wall of the state when it can serve no purpose. On the other hand, one has a duty, and not a right, never to let one atom of the liberty which the state allows to disappear; never to accept official ideology, but to create centres of independent thought. One has a duty to fight against the oppression of the state in so far as doing this does not result in suicide.”
― Simone Weil, Lectures on Philosophy

“I hated childhood
I hate adulthood
And I love being alive”
― Mary Ruefle, Trances of the Blast