Gaston

“But what are you? Buddhist? Japanese? Communist? What?’ ‘I’m nothing.’ ‘Can you be nothing?’ I never knew how to answer that question when I was asked it as a child, because the wording troubled me. Can you be nothing? I will be nothing.”
― Jaume Cabré, Confessions

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“If you need something to worship, then worship life - all life, every last crawling bit of it! We're all in this beauty together!”
― Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah