Ada

“If only people could travel as easily as words. Wouldn't that be something? If only we could be so easily revised.”
― Therese Anne Fowler, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

“It's much easier to write a solemn book than a funny book. It's harder to make people laugh than it is to make them cry. People are always on the verge of tears.”
― Fran Lebowitz

“In times when history still moved slowly, events were few and far between and easily committed to memory. They formed a commonly accepted backdrop for thrilling scenes of adventure in private life. Nowadays, history moves at a brisk clip. A historical event, though soon forgotten, sparkles the morning after with the dew of novelty. No longer a backdrop, it is now the adventure itself, an adventure enacted before the backdrop of the commonly accepted banality of private life.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“So quietly flows the Seine that
one hardly notices its presence. It is always there, quiet and unobtrusive, like a great
artery running through the human body. In the wonderful peace that fell over me
itseemed as if I had climbed to the top of a high mountain; for a little while I would be
able to look around me, to take in the meaning of the landscape.
Human beings make a strange fauna and flora. From a distance they appear
negligible; close up they are apt to appear ugly and malicious. More than anything they
need to be surrounded with sufficient space – space even more than time.
The sun is setting. I feel this river flowing through meits past, its ancient soil, the
changing climate. The hills gently girdle it about: its course is fixed.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer