"We've got to have rules and obey them. After all, we're not savages. We're English, and the English are best at everything."
— William Golding (Lord of the Flies)

"Miriam wished for so much in those final moments. Yet as she closed her eyes, it was not regret any longer but a sensation of abundant peace that washed over her. She thought of her entry into this world, the harami child of a lowly villager, an unintended thing, a pitiable, regrettable accident. A weed. And yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had loved and been loved back. She was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. A mother. A person of consequence at last. No. It was not so bad, Miriam thought, that she should die this way. Not so bad. This was a legitimate end to a life of illegitimate belongings."
— Khaled Hosseini (A Thousand Splendid Suns)

"What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on the top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell."
— Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep)

"and yet I feel that the most real home I'll ever have is the space where our roads merged and traveled along together... for a time."
— Craig Thompson (Good-bye, Chunky Rice)

"How can you hide from what never goes away?"
— Heraclitus

""But the thing people see most is his silence, because some kinds of silence are actually visible." ~Jason Blake in Anything but Typical"
— Nora Raligh Baskin

"also in the boom of the big bell there is a quaintness of tone which wakens feelings, so strangely far-away from all the nineteenth-century part of me, that the faint blind stirrings of them make me afraid, - deliciously afraid. never do I hear that billowing peal but I become aware of a striving and a fluttering in the abyssal part of my ghost, - a sensation as of memories struggling to reach the light beyond the obscurations of a million million deaths and births. I hope to remain within hearing of that bell... and, considering the possibility of being doomed to the state of a jiki-ketsu-geki, I want to have my chance of being reborn in some bamboo flower-cup, or mizutame, whence I might issue softly, singing my thin and pungent song, to bite some people that I know."
— Lafcadio Hearn (Kwaidan: Stories And Studies Of Strange Things)