"I feel an almost overwhelming interest in the methods of daylight abduction employed by the modern youth."
— Georgette Heyer (Devil's Cub)

"When you don't know where you're going, you drive on the highway."
— Roger Hedden (Bodies, Rest and Motion.)

"It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing and stretching one's arms again."
— Mark Rothko

"Επιθυμίες
Σαν σώματα ωραία νεκρών που δεν εγέρασαν
και τάκλεισαν, με δάκρυα, σε μαυσωλείο λαμπρό,
με ρόδα στο κεφάλι και στα πόδια γιασεμιά --
έτσ' η επιθυμίες μοιάζουν που επέρασαν
χωρίς να εκπληρωθούν· χωρίς ν' αξιωθεί καμιά
της ηδονής μια νύχτα, ή ένα πρωϊ της φεγγερό."

Desires
"Like beautiful bodies of the dead who had not grown old
and they shut them, with tears, in a brilliant mausoleum,
with roses at the head and jasmine at the feet --
this is what desires resemble that have passed
without fulfillment; without any of them having achieved
a night of sensual delight, or a morning of brightness."
— Constantine P. Cavafy (Before Time Could Change Them: The Complete Poems of Constantine P. Cavafy)

"Is this the curse of modernity, to live in a world without judgment, without perspective, no context for understanding or distinguishing what is real and what is imagined, what is manipulated and what is by chance beautiful, what is shadow and what is flesh?"
— Terry Tempest Williams

"I'm the oldest son of a crazy man, I'm in a cowboy band."
— Bob Dylan

"This loss [of freedom] means the fading from human life of values infinitely precious to it. The divergent use of individual temperaments can no longer find their various satisfactions in serious activities. There only remain ironbound conditions of employment and trivial amusements for leisure. "
— A. N. Whitehead

"Just as primitive man believed himself to stand face to face with demons and believed that could he but know their names he would become their master, so is contemporary man faced by this incomprehensible, which disorders his calculations. "If I can but grasp it, if I can but cognise it", so he thinks, "I can make it my servant.""
— Karl Jaspers (Man in the Modern Age)

" "The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance."

"
— Cicero

""In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, old people in America had prayed, 'Please God, don't let me look poor.' In the year 2000, they prayed, 'Please God, don't let me look old.' Sexiness was equated with youth, and youth ruled. The most widespread age-related disease was not senility but juvenility."
"
— Tom Wolfe (Hooking Up)

"Atticus, are we going to win it?
No, honey.
Then why-
Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win, Atticus said."
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

"The yellow commuter train ran through canal-crossed fields as dull as graph paper. Always one saw evidence of the tiny brick houses that the incontinent municipalities, Voorschoten and Leidschendam and Rijswijk and Zoetermeer, pooped over the rural spaces surrounding The Hague."
— Joseph O'Neill (Netherland)

"To be modern means to like antique furniture - and youthful neurosis."
— Hugo von Hofmannsthal