Madhuri

“The best attributes of anyone or anything usually reside on the surface, which is where, in fact, all of us live out our lives. Everyone has an inner life, but it's best if we leave it alone. For as soon as you poke a hole through that paper window, most of what's inside simply won't stand up to scrutiny.”
― Ge Fei, The Invisibility Cloak

“Lost in my dreams, I somehow cross at the traffic signals, bumping into street lamps or people, yet moving onward, exuding fumes of beer and grime, yet smiling, because my briefcase is full of books and that very night I expect them to tell me things about myself I don't know.”
― Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude

“When Marco Polo came at last to Cathay, seven hundred years ago, did he not feel--and did his heart not falter as he realized--that this great and splendid capital of an empire had had its being all the years of his life and far longer, and that he had been ignorant of it? That it was in need of nothing from him, from Venice, from Europe? That it was full of wonders beyond his understanding? That his arrival was a matter of no importance whatever? We know that he felt these things, and so has many a traveler in foreign parts who did not know what he was going to find. There is nothing that cuts you down to size like coming to some strange and marvelous place where no one even stops to notice that you stare about you.”
― Richard Adams, Watership Down

“A man thinks about many things in a forest, especially if a big river runs through it.”
― Jón Kalman Stefánsson, Summer Light, and Then Comes the Night: A Novel