Wintermute

“Ben era il sentimento dell’esilio quel vuoto che portavamo costantemente in noi, quella precisa emozione, il desiderio irragionevole di tornare indietro o invece di affrettare il cammino del tempo, queste due ardenti frecce della memoria.”
― Camus Albert

“È forse a questo che si devono i miraggi: il confine tra l'aria e la terra, tra l'acqua e le terre salmastre è logoro. Basta l'estro di un cervello assetato, un guizzo del pensiero, perché il mondo si cristallizzi in modo diverso, e allora l'aria infuocata diventa pietra slanciata azzurrognola, la terra scabra si intride di acqua placida, i palmeti si allungano fino all'orizzonte, e i raggi di un sole tremendo, devastante, si mescolano ai nugoli di polvere e si trasformano nelle cupole dorate di templi e palazzi... Perché l'uomo crea il mondo dei suoi desideri, quando è stremato.”
― Grossman Vasilij

“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?”

<...>

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.”
― T. S. Eliot Four Quartets

“This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune (often the surfeits of our own behavior) we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the Dragon's tail, and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows I am rough and lecherous. I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.”
― William Shakespeare, King Lear