Alexander Weber

“During her life she considered herself to be a great sinner, because it seemed as if she had a stain on her body, which she was very careful to hide. - What did he mean by this? What did she mean? Was it simply her ugly smallpoxed face that she covered always with her blanket? But even if I had enough Power to make her live before me, even if I had enough goodness to truly reach her through some loving agony of kindness and grief, she would only have turned away...
... In such a fashion perished Louys Amantacha. And yet I think that his death was a greater martyrdom than Tekakwitha's, for she chose hers; he did not. - Did he die screaming or singing? - Ask the Haudenosaunee.”
― William T. Vollmann

“In every community there is a class of people profoundly dangerous to the rest. I don't mean the criminals. For them we have punitive sanctions. I mean the leaders. Invariably the most dangerous people seek the power. While in the parlors of indignation the right-thinking citizen brings his heart to a boil. (p. 51)”
― Saul Bellow, Herzog

“I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was - I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale