Gabriel

“Do you know that I love now to recall and visit at certain dates the places where I was once happy in my own way? I love to build up my present in harmony with the irrevocable past, and I often wander like a shadow, aimless, sad, and dejected, about the streets and crooked lanes of Petersburg.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Vague speculation thrives in weather like this. The world is muffled in white, motor-roads and telegraph-poles vanish, a few castles appear in the middle distance; everything slips back hundreds of years. The details of the landscape - the leafless trees, the sheds, the church towers, the birds and the animals, the sledges and the woodmen, the sliced ricks and the occasional cowmen driving a floundering herd from barn to barn - all these stand out dark in isolation against the snow, distinct and momentous.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts

“Returning home
The shepherds found the sweet body
Decayed in the thorn-bush.

I am a shadow far from sombre villages.
God's silence I drank from the spring in the grove.

Cold metal enters upon my brow,
Spiders seek out my heart.
There is a light that goes out in my mouth.

At night I found myself on a heath,
Stiff with refuse and dust of stars.
In the hazel-bush
Crystalline angels sounded again.”
― Georg Trakl, Poems and Prose

“Oh, if only you knew how often I have been in love in that way...."
"How? With whom?..."
"Why, with no one, with an ideal, with the one I dream of in my sleep. I make up regular romances in my dreams" (White Nights 14)”
― Fydor Dostoevsky