Keerthi

“In life, the gaze of public opinion, the clash of interests, the struggle between rival greeds oblige us to hide our old rags, to disguise splits and stitches, to not extend to the world that which we reveal to our conscience; and the best of this obligation is when, by dint of deluding others, a man deludes himself, because in this case he is spared humiliation, which is a painful sensation, and hypocrisy, which is a ghastly vice. But in death, what a difference! What an unburdening! What freedom! How we can shake off our cloaks, toss our spangles into the gutter, unbutton ourselves, unpaint ourselves, unadorn ourselves, confess plainly what we were and what we failed to be!”
― Machado de Assis, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas

“Sometimes even dragons give birth to runts. It’s not the runt that’s the problem; it’s the task of shielding him from the world.”
― Neel Patel, Tell Me How to Be

“On the body of the bike is written “18 Til I Die,” the name of a Bryan Adams hit. It’s a joke, of course. Being eighteen until you die means you die when you’re eighteen.”
― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“And then man, tormented and unyielding, would run ahead of the fatality of things after a nebulous, elusive figure cobbled together out of scraps, a scrap of the intangible, another of the improbable, another of the invisible, all sewn with flimsy stitches by the needle of the imagination; and this figure—nothing less than the chimera of happiness—either fled constantly or allowed itself to be caught by its train, upon which man would clasp it to his breast, and then the figure would give a scornful laugh and vanish like an illusion.”
― Machado de Assis, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas