Anna

“I wanted to get me a full pack complete with everything necessary to sleep, shelter, eat, cook, in fact a regular kitchen and bedroom right on my back, and go off somewhere and find perfect solitude and look into the perfect emptiness of my mind and be completely neutral from any and all ideas. I intended to pray, too, as my only activity, pray for all living creatures; I saw it was the only decent activity left in the world. To be in some riverbottom somewhere, or in a desert, or in mountains, or in some hut in Mexico, or shack in Adirondack, and rest and be kind, and do nothing else, practice what the Chinese call "do-nothing".”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“You should not desire, he knows, the death of any human creature. Death is your prince, you are not his patron; when you think he is engaged somewhere, he will batter down your door, walks in and wipes his boots on you.”
― Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies

“It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall