Hal K

“Literature had torn Tessa and me apart, or prevented us from merging in the first place. That was its role in the world, I'd started to fear: to conjure up disagreements that didn't matter and inspire people to act on them as though they mattered more than anything. Without literature, humans would all be one. Warfare was simply literature in arms. The pen was the reason man invented the sword.”
― Walter Kirn, Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever

“But-! I say! The common conventions of humanity-'
'Are all very well for common people.”
― Wells, H. G. (Herbert George), The Invisible Man

“Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales

“Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books...”
― Richard Wright, Black Boy