Britt Aamodt

“It was better, he thought, to fail in attempting exquisite things than to succeed in the department of the utterly contemptible.”
― Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams

“Life and reading are not separate activities, When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.”
― Julian Barnes, A Life with Books

“We are, all of us, wandering about in a state of oblivion, borrowing our time, seizing our days, escaping our fates, slipping through loopholes, unaware of when the axe may fall.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, I Am, I Am, I Am

“Nietzsche needed no flamboyance, no outward proof of genius, so long as he had his illness. It enabled him to live numberless lifetimes within one. She noticed how his life fell into a general pattern. A regular recurrent decline into sickness always demarcated one period of his life from another. Every illness was a death, a dip down into Hades. Every recuperation was a joyful rebirth, a regeneration. This mode of existence refreshed him. During each fleeting recuperation the world gleamed anew. And so each recuperation became not only his own rebirth, but also the birth of a whole new world, a new set of problems that demanded new answers. It was like the annual fertility cycle of the god being plowed into the ground.”
― Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite! A Life of Nietzsche