Alice

“Come back, come back, dear friend, only friend, come back. I promise to be good.
If I was short with you, I was either kidding or just being stubborn; I regret all this more than I can express. Come back and all is forgotten. It is unbearable to think you took my joke seriously. I have been crying for two days straight. Come back. Be brave, dear friend. All is not lost. You only need to come back. We will live here once again, bravely, patiently. I’m begging you. You know it is for your own good. Come back, all of your things are here. I hope you now know that our last conversation wasn’t real. That awful moment. But you, when I waved to you to get off the boat, why didn’t you come? To have lived together for two years and to have come to that! What will you do? If you don’t want to come back here, would you want me to come to you?

Yes, I was wrong.

Tell me you haven’t forgotten me.

You couldn’t.

I always have you with me.

Listen, tell me: should we not live together anymore?
Be brave. Write immediately.
I can’t stay here much longer.
Listen to your heart.
Now, tell me if I should come join you.
My life is yours.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, I Promise to Be Good: The Letters of Arthur Rimbaud

“You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“Still, being able to feel pain was good, he thought. It's when you can't even feel pain anymore that you're in real trouble.”
― Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage