Konrad

“The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.”
― Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund

“Man, I want to die, is all,' cried Ploy.
'Don't you know,' said Dahoud, 'that life is the most precious possession you have?'
'Ho, ho,' said Ploy through his tears. 'Why?'
'Because,' said Dahoud, 'without it, you'd be dead.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“[T]he truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“Words are too awful an instrument for good and evil to be trifled with: they hold above all other external powers a dominion over thoughts. If words be not (recurring to a metaphor before used) an incarnation of the thought but only a clothing for it, then surely will they prove an ill gift; such a one as those poisoned vestments, read of in the stories of superstitious times, which had power to consume and to alienate from his right mind the victim who put them on. Language, if it do not uphold, and feed, and leave in quiet, like the power of gravitation or the air we breathe, is a counter-spirit, unremittingly and noiselessly at work to derange, to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate, and to dissolve.”
― William Wordsworth