Colleen

“Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?

But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God- so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing- straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“It took me a long time to understand that she wasn't being incoherent or contradictory, but rather that it was I myself, arrogant class renegade that I was, who tried to force her discourse into a foreign kind of coherence, one more compatible with my values—that incoherence appears to exist only when you fail to reconstruct the logic that lies behind any given discourse or practice. I came to understand that many different forms of discourse intersected in my mother and spoke through her, that she was constantly torn between her shame at not having finished school and her pride that even so, as she would say, she'd 'made it through and had a bunch of beautiful kids,' and that these two modes of discourse existed only in relation to each other.”
― Édouard Louis, En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule

“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state on innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.”
― James Baldwin

“Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.”
― Walker Percy, The Moviegoer