Clare

“I became aware of just how fleeting the sense of happiness was, and how flimsy its basis: a warm restaurant after having come in from the rain, the smell of food and wine, interesting conversation, daylight falling weakly on the polished cherrywood of the tables. It took so little to move the mood from one level to another, as one might push pieces on a chessboard. Even to be aware of this, in the midst of a happy moment, was to push one of those pieces, and to become slightly less happy.”
― Teju Cole, Open City

“We experience life as a continuity, and only after it falls away, after it becomes the past, do we see its discontinuities. The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float.”
― Teju Cole, Open City

“For animals, life is the living of it, the surviving of it, for the requisite time. But for us, life is sustained, or not, by words about life; life as something we can live or something we might find we are not actually living, or might turn out not to have lived. As though it may not always be exactly death we fear but the death in life we might find ourselves living or having lived. As though one could live a life that could turn out not to have been one.”
― Adam Phillips, On Giving Up

“And I stay where I’m standing. And I look up and I see that the stars aren’t visible anymore, there are clouds covering the stars and everything has gotten much darker. Now the moon is half covered by clouds, I see, and I see clouds moving, covering the whole moon, and then it’s totally dark, and I can barely see my mother and father anymore. They’ve disappeared into the darkness, they’re both totally covered in darkness now. And I’m alone in the darkness again, exactly like I was before. I can’t see anything. And my parents, they were here just now, I saw them, I did. They were here. But where did they go. Well obviously they just disappeared into the darkness, they’re not visible now the way nothing is visible when it gets dark enough, black enough.”
― Jon Fosse, A Shining