Alexandra

“Do you trust the House? I ask Myself.

Yes, I answer Myself.

And if the House has made you forget, then it has done so for good reason.

But I do not understand the reason.

It does not matter that you do not understand the reason. You are the Beloved Child of the House. Be comforted.

And I am comforted.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“We don’t love each other; we love the idea we have of each other. Very few humans understand this or can bear to contemplate it. They have blind faith in their own powers of creation. All love, ultimately, is self-love.”
― Robert Galbraith, The Silkworm

“All of the village was of a piece, a time, and a style; it was as though the people needed the ugliness of the village, and fed on it. The houses and the stores seemed to have been set up in contemptuous haste to provide shelter for the drab and the unpleasant, and the Rochester house and the Blackwood house and even the town hall had been brought here perhaps accidentally from some far lovely country where people lived with grace. Perhaps the fine houses had been captured—perhaps as punishment for the Rochesters and the Blackwoods and their secret bad hearts?—and were held prisoner in the village; perhaps their slow rot was a sign of the ugliness of the villagers.”
― Shirley Jackson

“Can you imagine us tolerating any form of rival intelligence on earth, no matter how it got here? Why, we can’t even tolerate anything but the narrowest differences of views within our own race. No,’ he shook his head, ‘no, I’m afraid Bocker’s idea of fraternization never had the chance of a flea in a furnace.”
― John Wyndham, The Kraken Wakes