Mao Lindloff

“She was so unsettled by love and the sense of her nakedness that her voice shrank in her throat. The peri­ods of the song warbled through the room. Her whole body seemed ablaze . The drunken , singing head shook with some delirious impulse that seemed to be destroy­ ing her. What insanity! She was weeping, in her wild nakedness, as she approached my bed, which to me was a death bed. She fell on her knees, she fell down in front of me and hid her tears in the sheets.”
― Georges Bataille, Blue of Noon

“Even now I occasionally get a long letter from Kimiko, who’s still in and out of mental hospitals. I’ve never written a reply. The Last Picture Show Iwas eighteen.”
― Ryū Murakami, Tokyo Decadence: 15 Stories

“Something was consuming the girl. I need help. She thought of her in that interview room, slightly breathless and entrancing. Wanting desperately to be told that nothing was her fault, that her body and brain had conspired against her. The feeling she must have, always, of being in between worlds, the worlds separated only by an impenetrable pane of glass.”
― Megan Abbott, Give Me Your Hand

“The belief that we somehow moved on to something else - whether still recognisably ourselves, or quite thoroughly changed - might be a tribute to our evolutionary tenacity and our animal thirst for life, but not to our wisdom. That saw a value beyond itself; in intelligence, knowledge and wit as concepts - wherever and by whoever expressed - not just in its own personal manifestation of those qualities, and so could contemplate its own annihilation with equanimity, and suffer it with grace; it was only a sort of sad selfishness that demanded the continuation of the individual spirit in the vanity and frivolity of a heaven.”
― Iain Banks