Jacey Dolaghan

“It is the same in life; the heart changes, and that is our worst misfortune ; but we learn of it only from reading or by imagination ; for in reality its alteration, like that of a certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change.”
― Marcel Proust , Swann's Way

“They left the village on a clear morning at dawn. In the early sunlight the whole of the Caucasus range, each single indentation, could be seen, brilliantly white with deep blue hollows, apparently so close at hand that a stranger to the region might have thought it mere two hours' drive away.
It towered so vast above petty human creation, so elemental in a man-made world, that even if all the men who had lived in all the past millennia had opened their arms as wide as they could and carried everything they had ever created or intended to create and piled it all up in massive heaps, they could never have raised a mountain ridge as fantastic as the Caucasus.”
― Alexander Solzhenitsyn

“My father, father!' - she might pray to the winds;
no innocence moves her judges mad for war.
Her father called his henchmen on,
on with a prayer,
'Host her over the alter
like a yearling, give it all your strength!
She's fainting - lift her,
sweep her robes around her,
but slip this strap in her gentle curving lips...
here, gag her hard, a sound will curse the house'-
and the bridle chokes her voice... her saffron robes
pouring over the sand
her glance like arrows showering
wounding every murderer through with pity
clear as a picture, live,
she strains to call their names...
I remember often the days with father's guests
when over the feast her voice unbroken,
purees the home her loving father
bearing third libations, sang to Saving Zeus -
transfixed with joy, Atreus' offspring
throbbing out their love.”
― Aeschylus

“As the different circumstances that bring us into contact with certain people do not coincide with the period in which we are in love with them, but, overlapping it, may occur before love has begun, and may be repeated after it has ended the easiest appearances in our lives of a person who is defined to take our fancy later on assume retrospectively in our eyes a certain value as an indication, a warning, presage. It was in this fashion that Swann had often reverted in his mind to the image of Odette encountered in the theatre on that first evening when he had no thought of ever seeing her again - and that he now recalled the party at Mme de Saint-Euverte's at which he had introduced General de Froberville to Mm de Cambremer. So manifold are our interest in life that it is not uncommon, on the self-same occasion, for the foundations of happiness which does not yet exist to be laid down simultaneously with the aggravation of grief from which we are still suffering.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way