a dog who learned to read

“The wind knocks the heads of the flowers together. Steam rises from every cup at every table at once. Things happen all the time, things happen every minute that have nothing to do with us.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“A human being, appearances to the contrary, doesn’t create his own purposes. These are imposed by the time he’s born into; he may serve them, he may rebel against them, but the object of his service or rebellion comes from the outside. To experience complete freedom in seeking his purposes he would have to be alone, and that’s impossible, since a person who isn’t brought up among people cannot become a person.”
― Stanisław Lem, Solaris

“All my life I have been passionately interested in monomaniacs of any kind, people carried away by a single idea. The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world.”
― Stefan Zweig, Chess Story

“Why start arguing—better this tranquil lullaby of clichés.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter