#literary text

[beljar]

I don't do anything with my life except romanticize and decay with indecision.

Allen Ginsberg, The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice: First Journals and Poems, 1937-1952

[nocturnaldisaster]

"We each have a special something we can get only at a special time of our life. Like a small flame. A careful, fortunate few cherish that flame, nurture it, hold it as a torch to light their way. But once that flame goes out, it’s gone for ever."

Haruki Murakami, "Sputnik Sweetheart"

[beljar]

I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself.

Henry David Thoreau, from Walden, 1854

[beljar]

We sit and talk, quietly, with long lapses of silence, and I am aware of the stream that has no language, coursing, beneath the quiet heaven of your eyes, which has no speech.

William Carlos Williams, from Paterson, 1946

[beljar]

But the landscape of devastation is still a landscape. There is beauty in ruins.

Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 2003

[beljar]

I feel as if I had been in the world a thousand years, and I trail my life behind me like an endless scarf.

Anton Chekhov, from The Seagull, 1895

[beljar]

Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yet--and this is its horror--it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world. Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, January 1, 1963