• About suffering they were never wrong,
• The Old Masters: how well they understood
• its human position; how it takes place
• While someone else is eating or opening a window
• or just walking dully along ;
• [...]
• In Brughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
• Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
• Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
• But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

— auden, 1-4 / 14-17 musée des beaux arts

• Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
• Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

— yeats, 3-4 the second coming

• They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
• They may not mean to, but they do.
• ...
• Man hands on misery to man.
• It deepens like a costal shelf.

— larkin, 1-2 / 9-10 this be the verse

--

• A serious house on serious earth it is,
• In whose bent air all our compulsions meet,
• Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
• And that much can never be obsolete,
• Since someone will forever be surprising
• A hunger in himself to be more serious,
• And gravitating with it to this ground,
• Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
• If only that so many dead lie round.

— larkin, 55-64 church going

• Ah, love, let us be true
• To one another! for the world, which seems
• To lie before us like a land of dreams,
• So various, so beautiful, so new,
• Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
• Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
• And we are here as on a darkling plain
• Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
• Where ignorant armies clash by night.

— arnold, 29-37 dover beach

• Mankind is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering.

--

The Brothers Karamazov

BOOK I

• As a general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more naive and simple-hearted than we suppose.
• "I want to live for immortality, and I will accept no other compromise." (Alyosha)
• "Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass taht he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and others." (Zossima)
• The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular.

• Dying
• Is an art, like everything else.
• I do it exceptionally well.
• [...]
• Herr God, Herr Lucifer
• Beware
• Beware.

— plath, 42-45 / 79-81 lady lazarus

• I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted
• To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
• How free it is, you have no idea how free——

— plath, 28-31 tulips

Meditations

• [...] who know moreover, that this transgressor, whosoever he be, is my kinsman, not by the same blood and seed, but by participation of the same reason, and of the same divine particle; How can I either be hurt by any of those, since it is not in their power to make me incur anything that is truly reproachful?

— I.XV

• [...] and that there is but a certain limit of time appointed unto thee, which if thou shalt not make use of to calm and allay the many distempers of thy soul, it will pass away and thou with it, and never after return.

— II.I

• Every man's happiness depends from himself, but behold thy life is almost at an en...

Letters to Milena

• I have spent all my life resisting the desire to end it.

The Great Gatsby

• I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
• I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.
• So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
• In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. "Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.”

• The Muses are turned gossips; they have lost
• The buskined step, and clear high-sounding phrase,
• Language of gods. Come, then, domestic Muse,

— barbauld, 1-3 washing day

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

• Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow- lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.