Nora Rawn

“The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism. And to alter now, cleanly and sanely, I want to shuffle off this loose living randomness: people; reviews; fame; all the glittering scales; and be withdrawn, and concentrated.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“And yet in a way one might say that the whole of life is a tissue of prodigious coincidences”
― Patrick O'Brian, The Surgeon's Mate