Jan

“If you knew how hard it is to obtain perfection in any wart, you would overlook shortcomings.”
― Lorenzo de' Medici

“In the University library he wandered through the stacks, among the thousands of books, inhaling the musty odor of leather, cloth, and drying page as if it were an exotic incense.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“I am half inclined to think we are all ghosts…it is not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that exists again in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and all kinds of old dead beliefs and things of that kind. They are not actually alive in us; but there they are dormant all the same, and we can never be rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it, I fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines. There must be ghosts all over the world. They must be as countless as the grains of the sands, it seems to me. And we are so miserably afraid of the light, all of us.”
― Henrik Ibsen, Ghosts

“Alas, poor country, almost afraid to know itself! It cannot be called our mother, but our grave.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth