Avery Rota

“Only man has turned away from the law of survival of the fittest, taken up the weak and ailing, and guaranteed their right to survival. So heroes perish, but the weak live on. One measure of a civilisation, in fact, is the percentage of misfits in its society. There's even a political scientist (anonymous) who claims that our modern age is an age "of the patient, by the patient, for the patient".”
― Kōbō Abe, Secret Rendezvous

“-Well, what happens with the River of Hades in the end?
-Not a thing. It's an infernal punishment precisely because nothing happens.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Woman in the Dunes

“Once he had seen a reproduction of an engraving called “Hell of Loneliness” and had thought it curious. In it a man was floating unsteadily in the air, his eyes wide with fright, and the space around him, far from being empty, was so filled with the semi-transparent shadows of dead persons that he could scarcely move. The dead, each with a different expression, were trying to push one another away, talking ceaselessly to the man. What was this “Hell of Loneliness”? he wondered. Perhaps they had misnamed it, he had thought then, but now he could understand it very well. Loneliness was an unsatisfied thirst for illusion. And so, one bit ones nails, unable to find contentment in the simple beating of ones heart. One smoked, unable to be satisfied with the rhythm of ones brain. One had the shakes, unable to find satisfaction in sex alone.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Woman in the Dunes

“The beauty of sand, in other words, belonged to death. it was the beauty of death that ran through the magnificence of its ruins and its great power of destruction”
― Kōbō Abe, The Woman in the Dunes