"'Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."
— James Joyce

"The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea."
— James Joyce (Ulysses)

"Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way"
— Marcel Proust

"Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth."
— Marcel Proust