Swandra

“他們就是這類人，他們不知道光明在那裡，可是他們實實在在的感德到寒涼就在他們的身上。他們想擊退了寒涼，因此而來了悲哀。他們被父母生下來，沒有什麼希望，只希望吃飽了，穿暖了。但也吃不飽，也穿不暖。

逆來的，順受了。
順來的事情，卻一輩子也沒有。”
― 蕭紅, 呼兰河传

“The terror of being judged sharpens the memory: it sends an inevitable glare over that long-unvisited past which has been habitually recalled only in general phrases. Even without memory, the life is bound into one by a zone of dependence in growth and decay; but intense memory forces a man to own his blameworthy past. With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man’s past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“This old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone avails, humanistic science, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being.”
― Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus

“Disease, and most specially opprobrious, suppressed, secret disease, creates a certain critical opposition to the world, to mediocre life, disposes a man to be obstinate and ironical toward civil order, so that he seeks refuge in free thought, in books, in study.”
― Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus