“And Polo said: “The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
Final paragraph of Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino.
“Once a bitch, always a bitch.”
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
by the false azure of the windowpane”
Vladimir Nabokov, opening line, Pale Fire
”‘What is this terror? what is this ecstasy?’ He thought to himself. ‘What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa,’ he said. For there she was.”
Last line, Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.