Kim

“I thought, in Nature, the defeated animal just rolls on its back in submission and that's the end of it,' said Vimes, as they clattered after the disappearing swamp dragon.
'Wouldn't work with dragons,' said Lady Ramkin. 'Some daft creature rolls on its back, you disembowel it. That's how they look at it. Almost human, really.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

“…What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don't know and I’m afraid. I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And what do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited. Yet I am not a cretin: lame, blind, and stupid.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I like it when it rains hard. It sounds like white noise everywhere, which is like silence but not empty.”
― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“So much have we lost touch with 'real life' that we occasionally feel a kind of disgust for it and so can't bear to be reminded of it. For we have arrived at the point where we look on 'real life' as toil, almost as compulsory service, and all of us privately agree that 'life' as we find it in book is better.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground