“I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.”
—Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat
“We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It’s as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we’re very fortunate, by time itself. There’s just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we’ve ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult.”
—Michael Cunningham, The Hours
“O, here
Will I set up my everlasting rest,
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last!
Arms, take your last embrace! and, lips, O you
The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss
A dateless bargain to engrossing death!”
—William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
“Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.”
—Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
“Strip back the beliefs pasted on by governesses, schools, and states, you find indelible truths at one’s core. Rome’ll decline and fall again, Cortés’ll lay Tenochtitlán to waste again, and later, Ewing will sail again, Adrian’ll be blown to pieces again, you and I’ll sleep under the Corsican stars again, I’ll come to Bruges again, fall in and out of love with Eva again, you’ll read this letter again, the sun’ll grow cold again. Nietzsche’s gramophone record. When it ends, the Old One plays it again, for an eternity of eternities.”
—David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
“I’m in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have, and I am in love with you.”
—John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
“There is ever and ever, she thought, that fascination with what has been and those we have loved that draws us back and back and back again to those moments of crisis when the whole of one’s life is relived. Those moments after which the inevitable conclusion can only be that nothing evermore will ever be the same.”
—Timothy Findley, Pilgrim
“Beauty is precious, you see, and the more beautiful something is, the more precious it is; and the more precious it is the more it hurts us that it will fade away; and the more we are hurt by beauty, the more we love the world.”
—Louis de Bernières, Birds Without Wings
“Take courage, lover!
Could you endure such pain
At any hand but hers?”
—Robert Graves, Symptoms of Love
“You’ve seen the sun flatten and take strange shapes just before it sinks in the ocean. Do you have to tell yourself every time that it’s an illusion caused by atmospheric dust and light distorted by the sea, or do you simply enjoy the beauty of it?”
—John Steinbeck, Sweet Thursday
