Peter

“I wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am. Well, but again, this life has its own mortal loveliness. And memory is not strictly mortal in its nature, either. It is a strange thing, after all, to be able to return to a moment, when it can hardly be said to have any reality at all, even in its passing. A moment is such a slight thing. I mean, that its abiding is a most gracious reprieve.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“There’s nothing that people rebel more against, I told Jacques, than being forced to acknowledge the secret and immediate power their fellow human beings have over them. There’s maybe nothing more common, routine. A savage power, as indifferent as a thunderbolt, where intellect, merit, beauty, language are nothing but animal electricity, a polarity that suddenly develops. Falling under the spell. Forever. We never talk about it—it’s taboo.”
― Julien Gracq, A Dark Stranger

“While traveling, a new destination would seem more desirable to you than wherever you were, right up to the moment you got there and found that your dissatisfaction had followed you: the mirage had shifted to the next stop-over point. Yet your preceding stops would become more attractive as you got further away from them. For you, the past would be forever improving, the future would draw you forward, but the present would weigh you down.”
― Édouard Levé, Suicide

“[Lear] is the universal image of the unwisdom and destructiveness of paternal love at its most ineffectual, implacably persuaded of its own benignity, totally devoid of self-knowledge, and careening onward until it brings down the person it loves best, and its world as well.”
― Harold Bloom