“Yet it does not feel like leisure. It feels like a held breath, like an eagle poised before the dive. My shoulders hunch and I cannot stop myself from looking down the empty beach. We are waiting to see what the gods will do.
We do not have to wait long.”
— Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles
“The barren sadness of the landscape had a strange fascination for me. I like to battle the cold winds. Do you understand what I mean? Sometimes cheerless places have more appeal to the heart than a scene of all pretty sunshine and flowers.”
— Sylvia Plath, from a letter to Hans-Joachim Neupert c. February 1950
“These reflections have dispelled the agitation with which I began my letter, and I feel my heart glow with an enthusiasm which elevates me to heaven; for nothing contributes so much to tranquilise the mind as a steady purpose - a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
“The labours I endured were no longer to be alleviated by the bright sun or gentle breezes of spring; all joy was but a mockery which insulted my desolate state and made me feel more painfully that I was not made for the enjoyment of pleasure.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
“Soon he sank into deep thought, or more accurately speaking, into a complete blankness of the mind; he walked along not observing what was about him and not caring to observe it.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
“Does such a thing as ‘the fatal flaw,’ that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History