Bethany

“He had illuminated the heartbreaking cruelty of war: When men who fight become nothing, only packages of bones and blood deposited in the earth with no clarion call to memory, those they love are left without a way to make such devastating loss hold meaning.”
― Patricia O'Brien, The Glory Cloak: A Novel of Louisa May Alcott and Clara Barton

“I fear that, with our current veneration for the natural and the real, we have arrived at the opposite pole to all idealism, and have landed in the region of the waxworks.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

“Far away, I could hear them lapping up my brains. Like Macbeth's witches, the three lithe cats surrounded my broken head, slurping up that thick soup inside. The tips of their rough tongues licked the soft folds of my mind. And with each lick my consciousness flickered like a flame and faded away.”
― Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

“Love knows no virtue, no merit; it loves and forgives and tolerates everything because it must. We are not guided by reason...”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs