Rohan

“It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things. Names are everything. I never quarrel with actions. My one quarrel is with words.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Real shrewdness means not letting any shrewdness show. It’s not like in the movies. The truly astute don’t sit in the shadows all day striking a pose. They don’t show off that they’re using their brains. They look all carefree and innocent. Some of them are tacky and mawkish, others careless and unserious. What’s critical is not to let others think you’re a person of interest. Let them look down on you or dismiss you and they won’t feel you’re an obstacle. You’re just a broom in the corner. The pinnacle of this is to make them not notice you at all, as if you don’t exist until the moment right before they die at your hands.”
― Cixin Liu

“LOVE: Deception of the flesh and damage to the spirit. Disease of the soul, atrophy of the brain, weakening of the heart, corruption of the senses, poetic lies from which one gets ferociously inebriated two or three times a day in order to consume this precious but stupid life more quickly. And yet I would prefer to die of love. Its the only swindler, after Judas, that can kill with a kiss.”
― Renzo Novatore, Toward the Creative Nothing and Other Writings

“Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed, with his carrier, and that he spoke to us? Probably. But in all that what truth will there be?

( Estragon, having struggled with his boots in vain, is dozing off again. Vladimir looks at him. ) He'll know nothing. He'll tell me about the blows he received and I'll give him a carrot. ( Pause. ) Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. ( He listens. ) But habit is a great deadener. ( He looks again at Estragon. ) At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on. ( Pause. ) I can't go on! ( Pause. ) What have I said?”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot