minnie

“What a thing this sleeplessness was! . . . If sleep, she thought, could be compared to a gentle lake in a dark place, then sleeplessness was a roaring ocean, a raging, wind-buffeted voyage, lit with mad rocket-lights, pursued by wild phantoms from behind, plunging upon fearful rocks ahead, a mad tempest of the past and present and future all in one. Through all this the pale, strenuous mariner must somehow steer a way, until at last the weary dawn, not of sleep, but of resignation to sleeplessness, comes to calm the waters of the mind.”
― Patrick Hamilton, The Slaves of Solitude

“Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling.”
― Graham Greene, Travels with My Aunt

“Being nearly four years old, she was certainly a child: and children are human (if one allows the term "human" a wide sense): but she had not altogether ceased to be a baby: and babies are of course not human--they are animals, and have a very ancient and ramified culture, as cats have, and fishes, and even snakes: the same in kind as these, but much more complicated and vivid, since babies are, after all, one of the most developed species of the lower vertebrates.
In short, babies have minds which work in terms and categories of their own which cannot be translated into the terms and categories of the human mind.
It is true that they look human--but not so human, to be quite fair, as many monkeys.
Subconsciously, too, every one recognizes they are animals--why else do people always laugh when a baby does some action resembling the human, as they would at a praying mantis? If the baby was only a less-developed man, there would be nothing funny in it, surely.”
― Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica