'in a world myriad as ours, the gaze is a singular act: to look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly.'

_Ocean Vuong

"there is no one day that clearly marks when winter ends and spring begins. Spring hides inside winter. We notice it emerging with our eyes, our skin and other senses. We find it in new buds, a comfortable breeze and the warmth of the sun.it exists alongside winter."

_Toshikazu Kawaguchi

"And he knows now that he has to be careful: he has tasted anger, and he knows he has to control it. He can feel it, waiting to burst from his mouth in a swarm of stinging black flies. Where has this rage been hiding? he wonders. How can he make it disappear?"

_a little life by Hanya Yanagihara

"He was frightened of everything, it sometimes seemed, and he hated that about himself. Fear and hatred, fear and hatred: often, it seemed those were the only two qualities he possessed. Fear of everyone else; hatred of himself."

_Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

"why could people like himself never see such things unless they were pointed out first by someone else?"

_ two solitudes, Hugh Maclennan

I did care. . .

I did say everything I thought

In the mildest words I knew. And now, . . .

I have to say I am relieved it is over:

At the end I could feel only pity

For that urge toward more life.

. . . Goodbye.

_Galway Kinnell.

For those who are near to you are far, you say, and this shows that distance begins to grow round you. And when your nearness is far, then your distance is already among the stars and very great; be glad of your growing, into which you can take no one else with you.

And in the man too there is motherhood, it seems to me, physical and spiritual; his begetting is also a kind of birth-giving, and it is birth-giving when he creates out of his innermost fullness.

-letters to a young poet, Ranier Maria Rilke

"I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things which I dare not confess to my own soul."

_Dracula, Bram Stoker.

Thus the enchantment of rhythms and tales began to inhabit you.

You went far away and were bewildered by the torn thread between reality and

imagination, between war narrated and war witnessed.

_ Mahmoud Darwish

'they say nothing lasts forever but they're just scared it will last longer than they can love it.'

_Ocean Vuong

"I'm lonely," he says aloud, and the silence of the apartment absorbs the words like blood soaking into cotton.

_a little life, hanya Yanagihara

Her bedroom window overlooked the garden, and now and then, usually when she was "having a bad spell," Mr. Helm had seen her stand long hours gazing into the garden, as though what she saw bewitched her. ("When I was a girl," she had once told a friend, "I was terribly sure trees and flowers were the same as birds or people. That they thought things, and talked among themselves. And we could hear them if we really tried. It was just a matter of emptying your head of all other sounds. Being very quiet and listening very hard. Sometimes I still believe that. But one can never get quiet enough...")

Truman Capote, In Cold Blood

'How can he, who loves peace and quiet, have any liking for all my bustle and din? Can he possibly be the first and only one to have looked through my concrete armour? And will it take him long to get there? Isn't there an old saying that love often springs from pity, or that the two go hand in hand? Is that the case with me too? Because I'm often just as sorry for him as I am for myself.'

_Anne Frank, The Diary Of A Young Girl

But when the crowd caught sight of the murderers, with their escort of blue-coated highway patrol-men, it fell silent, as though amazed to find them humanly shaped.

Truman Capote, In Cold Blood

All you who sleep tonight

Far from the ones you love,

No hands to left or right,

And emptiness above -

Know that you aren't alone.

The whole world shares your tears,

Some for two nights or one,

And some for all their years.

_All you who sleep tonight by Vikram Seth

"For the storyteller, the failure of love is irresistible in its drama, as is its brief happy madness, its comforts and vain griefs."