Najada Zylyftari

“And all was Caleb’s doing; all the doing of her simple father!  But he too had a Cricket on his Hearth; and listening sadly to its music when the motherless Blind Child was very young, that Spirit had inspired him with the thought that even her great deprivation might be almost changed into a blessing, and the girl made happy by these little means.  For all the Cricket tribe are potent Spirits, even though the people who hold converse with them do not know it (which is frequently the case); and there are not in the unseen world, voices more gentle and more true, that may be so implicitly relied on, or that are so certain to give none but tenderest counsel, as the Voices in which the Spirits of the Fireside and the Hearth address themselves to human kind.”
― Charles Dickens, The Cricket on the Hearth

“Was wissen sie davon? Sie waren jung, und man hat Sie mit Lügen vergiftet, bevor Sie urteilen konnten. Aber wir, - wir haben es gesehen und geschehen lassen! Was war es? Trägheit des Herzens? Gleichgültigkeit? Armut? Egoismus? Verzweiflung? Aber wie konnte es eine solche Pest weren? Meinen Sie, ich denke nicht täglich darüber nach?”
― Erich Maria Remarque, A Time to Love and a Time to Die

“She had experienced so much sorrow of her own, so much of life, that she knew better than to press for access to his places of refuge. She had witnessed herself how individuals became prisoners of these strongholds, of their loneliness, confined therein until their dying day.”
― Jan-Philipp Sendker, The Art of Hearing Heartbeats

“Every one of us knows fear,” he said. “So well! It encircles us like flies around ox dung. It puts animals to flight. They bolt and run or fly or swim until they believe themselves safe or until they keel over dead from exhaustion. Humans are no wiser. We see that there is no place on earth where we can hide from fear, yet still we attempt to find one. We strive for wealth and power. We abandon ourselves to the illusion that we are stronger than fear. We try to rule—over our children and our wives, over our neighbors and our friends. Ambition and fear have something in common: neither knows any limits. But with power and wealth it is just as with the opium I sampled more than once in my youth—neither keeps its promises. Opium never brought me eternal happiness. It only demanded more and more of me. Money and power do not vanquish fear. There is only one force more powerful than fear.”
― Jan-Philipp Sendker, The Art of Hearing Heartbeats