John

“Society is helpless without its champion," said Dr. Johns. "The more it itself employs its own will toward order, the more it is removed from the soil in which it roots; its freedom of will becomes a source of transgression against its deep-rooted instincts. In its dilemma it needs a crucifixion, someone to die in the name of chaos, a sacrifice of atonement to protect it against the primitive powers that threaten to falsify its order.”
― Etienne Leroux, One for the devil;

“Between shame and shamelessness lies the axis upon which we turn; meteorological conditions at both these poles are of the most extreme, ferocious type. Shamelessness, shame: the roots of violence.”
― Salman Rushdie, Shame

“No intellect is needed to see those figures who wait beyond the void of death – every child is aware of them, blazing with glories dark or bright, wrapped in authority older than the universe. They are the stuff of our earliest dreams, as of our dying visions. Rightly we feel our lives guided by them, and rightly too we feel how little we matter to them, the builders of the unimaginable, the fighters of wars beyond the totality of existence.

The difficulty lies in learning that we ourselves encompass forces equally great. We say, “I will,” and “I will not,” and imagine ourselves (though we obey the orders of some prosaic person every day) our own masters, when the truth is that our masters are sleeping. One wakes within us and we are ridden like beasts, though the rider is but some hitherto unguessed part of ourselves.”
― Gene Wolfe, Shadow & Claw

“… for overstrong was the command to hold fast to each smallest particle of time, to the smallest particle of every circumstance, and to embody all of them in memory as if they could be preserved in memory through all deaths for all times.”
― Hermann Broch, The Death of Virgil