Malte Decker

“Sleep, she said. Sleep while you can. Forget where you are and forget the mountain of days. Each one enormous, lost in some forest that never ends, but then the edge will fold back and you'll walk on what was the sky and is now only another forest floor, another layer, and you can feel the weight of hundreds of these layers above you.”
― David Vann, Aquarium

“But books are different. I often look for books that are like medicine, that fit my situation and my thoughts, and I read them over and over again until the pages are tattered, underlining everything and still the book will have something to give me. Books never tire of me. And in time they present a solution, quietly waiting until I am fully healed. That's one of the nicest things about books.”
― Baek Se-hee, I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki

“People kept their books, she thought, not because they were likely to read them again but because these objects contained the past--the texture of being oneself at a particular place, at a particular time, each volume a piece of one's intellect, whether the work itself had been loved or despised or had induced a snooze on page forty.”
― Tom Rachman, The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

“Being a hero was much easier than being a coward. To be a hero, you only had to be brave for a moment - when you took out the gun, threw the bomb, pressed the detonator, did away with the tyrant, and away with yourself as well. But to be a coward was to embark on a career that lasted a lifetime. You couldn't ever relax. You had to anticipate the next occasion when you would have to make excuses for yourself, dither, cringe, reacquaint yourself with the taste of rubber boots and the state of your own fallen, abject character. Being a coward required pertinacity, persistence, a refusal to change - which made it, in a way, a kind of courage.”
― Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time