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“When a person has lived alone for a long time, the only way to confirm that they still exist is to express activities and things in an easily shared syntax: this face, these bones that walk, this mouth, this hand that writes.”
― Valeria Luiselli

“Q. But if people differ, and each of them were to make their best work, would not the more gifted make better work, and the less gifted, less?

A. Yes. And wouldn't that be a nice planet to live on?”
― David Bayles and Ted Orland

“There, on the greensward, they found the golden chessmen with which they had played in the old days of power and glory. Now they had no one to lead, no one to guard; they had nothing to do but play chess and think back.”
― Ingri d'Aulaire, D'Aulaires' Book of Norse Myths

“The trails of light which they [moths] seemed to leave behind them in all kinds of curlicues and streamers and spirals..., did not really exist, explained Alphonso, but were merely phantom tracks created by the sluggish reaction of the human eye ,appearing to see a certain afterglow in the place from which the insect itself, shining for only the fraction of a second in the lamplight, had already gone. It was such unreal phenomena, said Alphonso, the sudden incursion of unreality into the real world, certain effects of light in the landscape spread out before us, or in the eye of a beloved person, that kindled our deepest feelings, or at least what we took for them.”
― W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz