Risca

“I had found a woman whom I had not known, and who from day to day had grown stranger to me, yet closer. Now she seemed to be slipping away from me again, into a realm where all names are forgotten, where there is only darkness and perhaps certain unknown laws of darkness. She rejected that dark realm; she came back, but she no longer
belonged to me as I had tried to believe. Perhaps she had never belonged to me; who, after all, belongs to whom, and what is it to belong to someone, to belong to one another? Isn't it a forlorn illusion, a convention? Time and again she turned back, as she called it, for an hour, for the duration of a glance, for a night. And always I felt like a bookkeeper who is not allowed to audit. I could only accept without question whatever this unaccountable, unhappy, damned, and beloved creature chose to be and to tell me. ... Loneliness demands a companion and does not ask who it is. If you don't know that, you may have been alone, but you were never lonely.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, The Night in Lisbon

“Man uses action to keep away the wasps of thought and understanding. The man of relentless labour and business is the perfect escapist; escaping the world by diving too deep into the world.”
― Giannis Delimitsos

“What a fucking tapestry woven by mad and sensitive egos; sometimes, the flatulence of words blows the intention out the window, but it is just a few steps backwards. I get so near to getting into detail about people and things, then like a pinball machine, my thoughts bang off sideways to some other peg and hang there for a nanosecond only to be tossed on somewhere else. Where is that still, quiet place of examination?”
― Gordon Roddick

“I would think of a thousand things,
Lovely and durable, and taste them slowly,
One after one, like tasting sweet food.
I have need to busy my heart with quietude.

- The Busy Heart”
― Rupert Brooke, 1914, and other poems