James May

“And suddenly great melancholy descended over him. What exactly am I doing? he wondered and didn’t even know why he had attacked himself so suddenly. No, don’t write today. And because this was a concession, an order not to be questioned—he scrutinized himself: if he sincerely wanted to could he work? and the answer was resolute: no—and since the decision was more powerful than him, he felt almost happy. Today someone was giving him time off. Not God. Not God, but someone. Very strong.”
― Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart

“Whatever was going on within me, said Austerlitz, the panic I felt on facing the start of any sentence that must be written, not knowing how I could begin it or indeed any other sentence, soon extended to what is in itself the simpler business of reading, until if I attempted to read a whole page I inevitably fell into a state of the greatest confusion. If language may be regarded as an old city full of streets and squares, nooks and crannies, with some quarters dating from far back in time while others have been torn down, cleaned up, and rebuilt, and with suburbs reaching further and further into the surrounding country, then I was like a man who has been abroad a long time and cannot find his way through this urban sprawl anymore, no longer knows what a bus stop is for, or what a back yard is, or a street junction, an avenue or a bridge. The entire structure of language, the syntactical arrangement of parts of speech, punctuation, conjunctions, and finally even the nouns denoting ordinary objects were all enveloped in impenetrable fog. I could not even understand what I myself had written in the past—perhaps I could understand that least of all. All I could think was that such a sentence only appears to mean something, but in truth is at best a makeshift expedient, a kind of unhealthy growth issuing from our ignorance, something which we use, in the same way as many sea plants and animals use their tentacles, to grope blindly through the darkness enveloping us.”
― W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz