Dolorous Haze

“I wondered about the masterminds who were directing all the mayhem. Did they really hope to survive? Or was I missing the point? Did they intend, instead, to incinerate themselves and all of us with them? Like mummified pharaohs and their entombed slaves. Why do that? Maybe just to prove that they owned the world. After all, you don’t own something unless you can destroy it.”
― Stepan Chapman, The Troika

“He wrote up the cases of his own patients who believed themselves to be someone other than themselves. There were Virgin Marys, Christs and Gods, Marilyn Monroes and Elvis Presleys. Movie stars and even characters from literature took over the lives of Ambrose’s patients. Jane Eyre sometimes screamed in an imaginary red room at Mandala.”
― Carmel Bird, The White Garden

“..fairy was delusion, so was the law. At any rate, it was a sort of magic, moulding reality into any shape it chose.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

“I had to be so ugly that the humiliation I brought on myself would humiliate him, too. I would have to strip every last filament of gold from my skin--all the gold I had put there--and strip the gold from his skin, so that none of the gold on him would reflect onto me, and so none of the gold on my would reflect onto him, so we would be in utter darkness together. I curled myself around his legs. I knew he'd never understand why I was doing it--that he was misunderstanding what I meant. But I didn't care if he got me wrong. The way he saw me was not the same thing as me.”
― Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?