Ben

“Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance.”
― Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener

“It’s so hard for women—even nice women—to realize that their bodies are not irresistible.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

“It is better to be unhappy and know the worst, than to be happy in a fool's paradise.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“When does one ever know a human being? Perhaps only after one has realized the impossibility of knowledge and renounced the desire for it and finally ceased to feel even the need of it. But then what one achieves is no longer knowledge, it is simply a kind of co-existence; and this too is one of the guises of love.”
― Iris Murdoch, Under the Net