Sirensongs

“The life of an individual is a constant struggle, and not merely a metaphorical one against want or boredom, but also an actual struggle against other people. He discovers adversaries everywhere, lives in continual conflict and dies with sword in hand.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the World

“The poets are a harmless little folk, with their dreams and raptures and heaven full of Greek gods that they carry about with them in their fantasy. But they become wicked as soon as they presume to hold their ideal up to reality and then flail the latter angrily, when they should have nothing at all to do with it. They would, nevertheless, remain harmless if they were only granted their free little place in reality un disturbed and not compelled through crowding and pressure to cast a backward glance at it, for it reaches beyond the clouds, and they themselves cannot survey it all and must cling to the stars as provisory border points, of which, however, who knows how many are yet today invisible, their light still in the process of journeying down to us.”
― Ernst August Friedrich Klingemann

“For Nature, if she once endows man or woman with romance, gives them so rich a store of it as shall last them, life through, unto the end. In sickness or health, in poverty or riches, through middle age and old age, through loss of hair and loss of teeth, under wrinkled face and gouty limbs, under crow’s-feet and double chins, under all the least romantic and most sordid malaisances of life, romance endures to the end. Its price is altogether above rubies; it can never be taken away from those that have it, and those that have it not, can never acquire it for money, nor by the most utter toil—no, nor ever arrive at the very faintest comprehension of it.”
― John Meade Falkner, The Nebuly Coat

“All I can offer is this (without a single remembrance or image, or even incoherent wisp of correspondence), even so I knew, in those eradicated moments, and I know still: That there, there outside the gates of any physical state or world we may inhabit, something is—which, being so unlike, so beautiful and radiant and eternal—can never be transported into living life, not even by a word. Brighter than fires, more soft than fur, better than the best—nameless, non-communicable, absolute. And, without a bookmark in our hearts or brains to enable us to find it while here, yet there—there it nevertheless is, and will be ever. There is nothing to fear or to regret. There is no end. Only always a Beginning—that not even the most lucid scripture, or most transcendent art (even that of the Scarlet Lily, Cremisia Ranaldi) can recreate. We touch upon it, yes, I believe we do, in our greatest poets (which is why, if only as a ghost, she could undo the door). In the best of love or joy, that too—but all of this is a shadow. The shadow of the Nothing which is Everything.”
― Tanith Lee, Redder Than Blood