“Every day my anxiety is higher,
every day the grief more mortal.
Today more than yesterday terror exalts me…”
― Pier Paolo Pasolini, Roman Poems

“Omnia mutantur, nihil interit (everything changes, nothing perishes).”
― Publius Ovidius Naso, Metamorphoses

“All the world\'s a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.”
― Seán O\'Casey

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anais Nin

“There is no bond like having read and liked the same books.”
― E. Nesbit, Der verzauberte Garten

“I want
To do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.”
― Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

“After all, the three of us were young. It wasn’t just about the pleasure of the flesh. No, it wasn’t that simple. The flesh is easy to satisfy. It’s the heart that is insatiable, the heart that needs to love, to despair, to burn with any kind of fire…That was what we wanted. To burn, to be consumed, to devour our days just as fire devours the forest.”
― Irene Nemirovsky, Fire in the Blood

“You become [a] writer by writing. It is a yoga.”
― R. K. Narayan

“This education has reduced us to a nation of morons; we were strangers to our own culture and camp followers of another culture, feeding on leavings and garbage . . . What about our own roots? . . . I am up against the system, the whole method and approach of a system of education which makes us morons, cultural morons, but efficient clerks for all your business and administration offices.”
― R.K. Narayan, The English Teacher

“Staring is half the victory in love.”
― R.K. Narayan, The Bachelor of Arts

“Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.”
― V. S. Naipaul, Half a Life

“government that breaks its own laws can also easily break you.”
― V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River

“A stranger could drive through Miguel Street and just say “Sum!” because he could see no more. But we who lived there saw our street as a world, where everybody was quite different from everybody else. Mam-man was mad; George was stupid; Big Foot was a bully; hat was an adventurer; Popo was a philosopher; and Morgan was our comedian.”
― V.S. Naipaul, Miguel Street