Swandra

“Being with you or without you is how I measure my time.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, The Gold of the Tigers: Selected Later Poems

“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

“There could have been no two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion

“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