Benjamin

“You dont know what antipsychotics are and you dont know how they work. Or why. All we have finally is the spectacle of tardive dyskinetics feeling their way along the wall. Jerking and drooling and muttering. Of course for those trekking toward the void there are waystations where the news will very suddenly become altogether bleaker. Maybe a sudden chill. There’s data in the world available only to those who have reached a certain level of wretchedness. You dont know what’s down there if you havent been down there.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“We can prevent reading: but in the decree that forbids reading there will be still read something of the truth that we would wish never to be read.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“Accountancy’s night spawns witches. Brush and broom in hand they launch themselves across those smooth surfaces, tracing out their spells.”
― Italo Calvino, Numbers in the Dark

“One of the things I realized was that the universe had been evolving for countless billions of years in total darkness and total silence and that the way that we imagine it is not the way that it was. In the beginning always was nothing. The novae exploding silently. In total darkness. The stars, the passing comets. Everything at best of alleged being. Black fires. Like the fires of hell. Silence. Nothingness. Night. Black suns herding the planets through a universe where the concept of space was meaningless for want of any end to it. For want of any concept to stand it against. And the question once again of the nature of that reality to which there was no witness. All of this until the first living creature possessed of vision agreed to imprint the universe upon its primitive and trembling sensorium and then to touch it with color and movement and memory. It made of me an overnight solipsist and to some extent I am yet.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris