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“To Vik Lovell who told me dragons did not exist, then led me to their lairs ...”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“For several years, I had been bored. Not a whining, restless child's boredom (although I was not above that) but a dense, blanketing malaise. It seemed to me that there was nothing new to be discovered ever again. Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative (although the word derivative as a criticism is itself derivative). We were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can't recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn't immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A fucking commercial. You know the awful singsong of the blasé: Seeeen it. I've literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can't anymore. I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script.

It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters.

And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don't have genuine souls.

It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I'm not a real person and neither is anyone else.

I would have done anything to feel real again.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“Ne, nė vienas žmogus ilgai negalėtų pakelti tokio liepsningo gyvenimo. <...> Niekas negalėtų taip ilgai dieną naktį deginti visus savo žiburius, eikvoti visus savo vulkanus, niekas neįstengtų taip ilgai dieną naktį stovėti liepsnose, kasdien daug valandų su įkaitusia galva mąstyti, nuolatos mėgaudamasis, nuolatos kurdamas, nuolatos šviesus, su budriais jausmais ir nervais nelyginant pilis, už kurios langų kasdien skamba muzika, o naktimis tviska tūkstančiai žvakių.”
― Hermann Hesse, Klingsors letzter Sommer

“The weather is wonderful. The sun has excelled itself and the procession passing our microphones is flooded by the bright warm light that comes down from the incredibly blue sky. On the branches of trees I can see birds, thousands of them. It's difficult to believe that we have so many birds. We spend our time grumbling and it takes a festive day like this, after years of mistakes and deviations, to make us realize how we abound in birds. Those birds are singing, they are singing so stupendously that it seems that they are not birds, but...horses.”
― Mrożek Sławomir