Marcus

“Bleakly, Harriet gazed out into the antiseptic gloom. A weight lay upon her, and a darkness. She’d learned things she never knew, things she had no idea of knowing, and yet in a strange way it was the hidden message of Captain Scott: that victory and collapse were sometimes the same thing.”
― Donna Tartt, The Little Friend

“Yet I have known madness not only in the guise of an evil shadow. I have seen it also as a flash of delight so rich and shattering that the very absence of an immediate object on which it might settle was to me a form of escape.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Look at the Harlequins!

“The perfectly ordinary girl and the great philosopher are alike: for both, the smallest triviality can become the vision that wipes out the world.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Decay of the Angel

“The barrenness of sand, as it is usually pictured, was not caused by simple dryness, but apparently was due to the ceaseless movement that made it inhospitable to all living things. What a difference compared with the dreary way human beings clung together year in year out.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Woman in the Dunes