Mansour

“[…] A brother don’t need a gate – he jumps the fence. That’s street.’
‘Again, please?’ said Howard.
‘Street, street,’ bellowed Zora. It’s like, “being street”, knowing the street – in Levi’s sad little world if you’re a Negro you have some kind of mysterious holy communion with sidewalks and corners.”
― Zadie Smith, On Beauty

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
"The Road Not Taken”
― Robert Frost

“My brother asked the birds to forgive him: that sounds senseless, but it is right; for all is like an ocean, all is flowing and blending; a touch in one place sets up movement at the other end of the earth. It may be senseless to beg forgiveness of the birds, but birds would be happier at your side –a little happier, anyway– and children and all animals, if you yourself were nobler than you are now. It’s all like an ocean, I tell you. Then you would pray to the birds too, consumed by an all-embracing love in a sort of transport, and pray that they too will forgive you your sin.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die. This life appears unbearable, another unattainable. One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die; one asks to be moved from the old cell, which one hates, to a new one, which one willl only in time come to hate. In this there is also a residue of belief that during the move the master will chance to come along the corridor, look at the prisoner and say: "This man is not to be locked up again, He is to come with me.”
― Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks