--Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, Or The Evening Redness In The West
So it is the old meat after all, no matter how old. Because if memory exists outside of the flesh it wont be memory because it wont know what it remembers so when she became not then half of memory became not and if I become not then all of remembering will cease to be. --Yes he thought Between grief and nothing I will take grief.
--William Faulkner, The Wild Palms [If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem]
It's hard to let go anything we love. We live in a world which teaches us to clutch. But when we clutch we're left with a fistful of ashes.
--Madeleine L'Engle, A Ring Of Endless Light
In eternity this world will be like Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets.
--Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
So you mustn’t be frightened, if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall.
--Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet
When you choose one way out of many, all the ways you don't take are snuffed out like candles, as if they'd never existed.
--Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass