Gabriella

“When they jumped down on the tracks, stretched their limbs, picked flowers, and took a little run, they all had the feeling that the place had just emerged only thanks to the stop, and that the swampy meadow with its knolls, the wide river, with a beautiful house and a church on the high bank opposite, would not be there had it not been for the accident that had taken place.”
― Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago

“I couldn't conceive a position in which life would not be a misery, that we are all created to be miserable, and that we all know it, and all invent means of deceiving each other. And when one sees the truth, what is one to do?”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“I don’t matter, you don't matter, we're all just matter, codes, scrambles of signs and symbols, the language the world mumbles to itself, or maybe its consciousness, our eyes and ears and mouths sprouting from it like polyps, here to watch and hear and sense it. To record its events and ruptures, its growing and its rotting, its dismal spin.”
― Namwali Serpell, The Furrows

“Here was a man who now for the first time found himself looking into the eyes of death, who was passing through one of those rare moments of experience when we feel the truth of a commonplace, which is as different from what we call ‘knowing it’ as the vision of waters upon the earth is different from the delirious vision of water which cannot be had to cool the burning tongue. When the commonplace ‘we all must die’ transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness ‘I must die, and soon.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch