Stephen Roberts

“He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“Exhausted, hardly knowing what she was doing, she came the last three steps and sat, took the man in her arms, actually held him, gazing out of her smudged eyes down the stairs, back into the morning. She felt wetness against her breast and saw that he was crying again. He hardly breathed but tears came as if being pumped. "I can't help," she whispered, rocking him, "I can't help." It was already too many miles to Fresno.”
― Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

“Americans have dissipated their racial energy in an orgy of stone-breaking. In their few years they have broken more stones than did centuries of Egyptians, and they have done their work hysterically, desperately, almost as if they knew that the stones would some day break them.”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts / A Cool Million

“What to me also seems most striking in this respect is how the great poetic geniuses (an Ossian, a Homer) are presented as blind. Naturally it doesn't matter to me whether they really were blind; the point is people have imagined them so, as if to indicate that what they saw when they sang of the beauty of nature appeared not to the external eye but to an inner intuition. How remarkable that one of the writers on bees - yes, the best of them - was blind from early youth; it's as if to show that here, where you would have thought external observation so important, he had found that point and from it was then able by purely mental activity to infer back to all particulars and reconstruct them in analogy with nature.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection