Jeff VanderMeer: Acceptance

Perhaps so many journals had piled up in the lighthouse because on some level most came, in time, to recognize the futility of language. Not just in Area X but against the rightness of the lived-in moment, the instant of touch, of connection for which words were such a sorrowful disappointment, so inadequate an expression of both the finite and the infinite.

You could know the what of something forever and never discover the why.

Never has a setting been so able to live without the souls traversing it.

Natural places are no different than human cities. The old exists next to the new. Invasive species integrate with or push out native species. The landscape you see around you is the same as seeing an old cathedral next to a skyscraper.

We must trust our thoughts while we sleep. We must trust our hunches. We must begin to examine all of those things that we think of as irrational simply because we do not understand them. In other words, we must distrust the rational, the logical, the sane, in an attempt to reach for something higher, for something more worthy.

Alain-Fournier: Le Grande Meaulnes

This evening, which I have tried to spirit away, is a strange burden to me. While time moves on, while the day will soon end and I already wish it gone, there are men who have entrusted all their hopes to it, all their love and their last efforts. There are dying men or others who are waiting for a debt to come due, who wish that tomorrow would never come. There are others for whom the day will break like a pang of remorse; and others who are tired, for whom the night will never be long enough to give them the rest that they need. And I - who have lost my day - what right do I have to wish that tomorrow comes?

I thought too that our youth was over and we had failed to find happiness.

Peter Ackroyd: Charlie Chaplin: A Brief Life

"A fearsomely cruel man . . . probably the most sadistic man I'd ever met."

- Marlon Brando

A deeply congenial character who seemed to epitomize the human condition itself, flawed and frail and funny.

Adolfo Bioy Casares: The Invention of Morel

And the reason I am so nervous is that everything I do now is leading me to one of three possible futures... Which one will it be? Time alone will tell. But still I know that writing this diary can perhaps provide the answer; it may even help produce the right future.
To be on an island inhabited by artificial ghosts was the most unbearable of nightmares,- to be in love with one of those images was worse than being in love with a ghost (perhaps we always want the person we love to have the existenceof a ghost).

The sea is endless when you are in a rowboat.

...when one is alone it is impossible to be dead.

The case of the inventor who is duped by his own invention emphasizes our need for circumspection.