Words.

Do you think I am mad? Without her! Man! what are you made of? To think that she moves, lives, breathes out of my sight. I am jealous of the wind that fans her, of the air she breathes, of the earth that receives the caress of her foot, of the sun that looks at her now, while I… I haven’t seen her for two days – two days.

-Joseph Conrad, An Outcast of the Islands.

I haven’t written down a great deal about myself during these days, partly because of laziness … but also partly because of the fear of betraying my self-perception. This fear is justified, for one should permit a self-perception to be established definitively in writing only when it can be done with the greatest completeness, with all the incidental consequences, as well as with entire truthfulness. For if this does not happen – and in any event I am not capable of it – then what is written down will, in accordance with its own purpose and with the superior power of the established, replace what has been felt only vaguely in such a way that the real feeling will disappear while the worthlessness of what has been noted down will be recognized too late.

-Franz Kafka.

… your experience of me is invisible to me and my experience of you is invisible to you. I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men. All men are invisible to one another. Experience is man’s invisibility to man.

-R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience.

For neither man nor angel can discern
Hypocrisy, the only evil that walks
Invisible except to God alone
By His permissive will through Heav’n and Earth.

-John Milton, Paradise Lost.

… the fact that man is a morally responsible being who, voluntarily or involuntarily, submits to the morality that he himself has created.

-Carl Gustav Jung, Dreams.

When I walk, stay behind;
Don’t get close to me,
‘Cause it’s sure to end in tears,
So just let me be.

Some will say that I’m no good;
Maybe I agree.
Take a look then walk away.
That’s all right with me.

-Eric Clapton, Lonely Stranger.

Because you are a pagan, you have to invest some concrete object – a thing – with power outside yourself.

-Nadine Gordimer, The Conservationist.

Mais un souvenir, un chagrin, sont mobiles. Il y a des jours où ils s’en vont si loin que nous les apercevons à peine, nous les croyons partis. Alors nous faisons attention à d’autres choses.

-Marcel Proust, «À la recherche du temps perdu»; «Le Côté de Guermantes».

Car le regret comme le désir ne cherche pas à s’analyser, mais à se satisfaire; quand on commence d’aimer, on passe le temps non à savoir qu’est son amour, mais à préparer les possibilitiés des rendez-vous du lendemain.

-Marcel Proust, «À la recherche du temps perdu»; « À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs».

Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot?

-Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot.