Alexis

“You pessimists always fall into the disillusion trap,” said the cheerful man cheerfully. “From one distance a thing looks bright. From another it looks dark. You think you’ve found the truth when you’ve replaced the cheerful view by the opposite, but true profundity blends all possible views, bright as well as dark.”
― Alasdair Gray, Lanark

“There are many husbands like Zahar in the world. A diplomatist will sometimes carelessly listen to his wife's advice, shrug his shoulders, and secretly write what she told him. A Government official will whistle and make a contemptuous grimace at his wife's chatter about some important affair - and the next day he will solemnly repeat this chatter to the Minister. These gentlemen treat their wives morosely or lightly, despising them, like Zahar, as mere women, or regarding them as a pleasant relaxation from the serious life of business.”
― Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov

“Time goes in cycles, as well as in a line. A planet revolving: you see? One cycle, one orbit around the sun, is a year, isn’t it? And two orbits, two years, and so on. One can count the orbits endlessly—an observer can. Indeed such a system is how we count time. It constitutes the timeteller, the clock. But within the system, the cycle, where is time? Where is beginning or end? Infinite repetition is an atemporal process. It must be compared, referred to some other cyclic or noncyclic process, to be seen as temporal. Well, this is very queer and interesting, you see. The atoms, you know, have a cyclic motion. The stable compounds are made of constituents that have a regular, periodic motion relative to one another. In fact, it is the tiny time-reversible cycles of the atom that give matter enough permanence that evolution is possible. The little timelessnesses added together make up time. And then on the big scale, the cosmos: well, you know we think that the whole universe is a cyclic process, an oscillation of expansion and contraction, without any before or after. Only within each of the great cycles, where we live, only there is there linear time, evolution, change. So then time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river, without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation. And there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or seasons or promises.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“Be courageous, we say, but no one is courageous, as a sound we do not hear lifts the birds off the water.”
― Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic