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“Suddenly a sorrow the color of dawn welled up in him. They might as well lick each other’s wounds. But they would lick forever, and the wounds would never heal, and in the end their tongues would be worn away.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Woman in the Dunes

“When I looked at you from a distance you would smile invitingly, but when I approached, the smile would change into mist and obstruct my view.
...
It may be that someone else’s tenderness can be experienced only as pain.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Face of Another

“The world itself, like the mask, began to seem difficult to believe in, and I was stricken with an unutterable sense of loneliness.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Face of Another

“To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else's heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera