Hagar

“It was always and ever hard to tell with women why they chose one way and not another.”
― Jane Smiley, The Greenlanders

“As a matter of fact, reality is itself a combination of determinisms, and freedom consists in overcoming and transcending these determinisms. Freedom is completely without meaning unless it is related to necessity, unless it represents victory over necessity....We must not think of the problem in terms of a choice between being determined, but that it is open to him to overcome necessity, and that this act is freedom. Freedom is not static but dynamic; not a vested interested, but a prize continually to be won. The moment man stops and resigns himself, he becomes subject to determinism. He is most enslaved when he thinks he is comfortably settled in freedom.”
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

“There are no more than two or three crimes to commit in the world,’ said Curval. ‘Once those are done there is no more to be said – what remains is inferior and one no longer feels a thing. How many times, good God, have I not wished it were possible to attack the sun, to deprive the universe of it, or to use it to set the world ablaze – those would be crimes indeed, and not the little excesses in which we indulge, which do no more than metamorphose, in the course of a year, a dozen creatures into clods of earth.”
― Marquis de Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom: A Classic of Extreme French Literature

“My mind is troubled, like a fountain stirr'd; And I myself see not the bottom of it.”
― William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida