James

“Four eyes full of gleams and radiance beneath their lashes, filling the looking-glass. Questions shooting out and then hiding again. I don't know: Gleams and radiance, gleaming from you to me, from me to you, and from me to you alone—into the mirror and out again, and never an answer about what this is, never an explanation.”
― Tarjei Vesaas, The Ice Palace

“The dignity and beauty of the room he and Efor were in was as real as the squalor to which Efor was native. To him a thinking man's job was not to deny one reality at the expense of the other, but to include and to connect.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“What drives people crazy is trying to live outside reality. Reality is terrible. It can kill you. Given time, it certainly will kill you. The reality is pain–you said that! But it's the lies, the evasions of reality, that drive you crazy. It's the lies that make you want to kill yourself.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“As he struck her, he felt his chest suffocating under waves of desperate sadness, like a child abandoned by its parents.”
― Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, The Siren’s Lament: Essential Stories