Maíra

“Everything with them is ‘the influence of environment,’ and nothing else. Their favorite phrase! From which it follows that, if society is normally organized, all crime will cease at once, since there will be nothing to protest against and all men will become righteous in one instant. Human nature is not taken into account, it is excluded, it’s not supposed to exist! They don’t recognize that humanity, developing by a historical living process, will become at last a normal society, but they believe that a social system that has come out of some mathematical brain is going to organize all humanity at once and make it just and sinless in an instant, quicker than any living process! That’s why they instinctively dislike history, ‘nothing but ugliness and stupidity in it,’ and they explain it all as stupidity! That’s why they so dislike the living process of life; they don’t want a living soul”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing… was struck into stability.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“It’s too late to correct it,” said the Red Queen: “when you’ve once said a thing, that fixes it, and you must take the consequences.”
― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass And What Alice Found There

“The years that are gone seem like dreams--if one might go on sleeping and dreaming--but to wake up and find--oh! well! Perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one's life.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening and Other Stories