Tommaso Querini

“But intimate time was not just lived and lost, it was converted into the story Chloe and I told ourselves about ourselves, the self-referential narrative of our love. With its roots in the epic tradition, love is necessarily tied to the tale [to speak of love always involves narrative], and more particularly, to adventure, structured by clear beginnings, endings, goals, reversals and triumphs.
[..] However slight these leitmotifs were, they acted like cement, the language of intimacy they helped create was a reminder that [..] Chloe and I had created something of a world together.”
― Alain de Botton, On Love

“It was less the fact of Yoshiko's defilement than the defilement of her trust in people which became so persistent a source of grief as almost to render my life insupportable. [...] Yoshiko's immaculate trustfulness seemed clean an pure, like a waterfall among green leaves. One night sufficed to turn the waters of this pure cascade yellow and muddy. Yoshiko began from that night to fret over my every smile or frown.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“Nor is this uncommon, as Mervyn will tell you if you ask him. He has seen all of it before many times, including the curious pull that a corpse exerts, drawing people towards it. By tomorrow already this will have changed, the body will be long gone and its permenent absence covered over with plans, arrangements, reiminiscences and time. Yes, already. The disappearance begins immediately and in a certain sense never ends.
But in the mean time there is the body, the horrible meaty fact of it [..] Fortunately she isn't heavy, the sickness hollowed her out, and it's easy to get her down the stairs and around the challenging angle at the bottom and along the passage to the kitchen.”
― Damon Galgut, The Promise

“Foolish old earth, returning and repeating itself, over and over. Never misses a show. How can you bear it, you ancient tart, giving the identical performance again and again, evenings and matinées, while the theatre crumbles around you, the lines in the script unchanging, to say nothing of the make-up, the costumes, the extravagant gestures … Tomorrow and tomorrow and the day after that …”
― Damon Galgut, The Promise