James

“The cat is the beautiful devil.”
― Charles Bukowski, On Cats

“Melancholy is the happiness of being sad.”
― Victor Hugo

“Tenderness is a deeper instinct than seduction, which is why it is so hard to give up hope.”
― Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles

“Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises out of memory, and so (as Nietzsche saw) out of pain, the pain of surrendering easier pleasures in favour of much more difficult ones ... successful literary works are achieved anxieties, not releases from anxieties.”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages