The bluish colour of non-existence

(Conversation between Ernest Hemingway and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

'And do you know how to be dead, Johann?' asked Hemingway, in order to lighten the gravity of the moment. 'Do you really believe that the best way to be dead is to waste time chatting with me?'

'Don't make a fool of yourself, Ernest,' said Goethe. 'You know perfectly well that at this moment we are but the frivolous fantasy of a novelist who lets us say things we would probably never say on our own. But to conclude.... You see, I have come to the definite conclusion that the eternal trial is bullshit. I have decided to make use of my death at last and, if I can express it with such an imprecise term, to go to sleep. To enjoy the delights of total non-existence, which my great enemy Novalis used to say has a bluish colour.'

Milan Kundera - Immortality, 240

She knew he was too mad

Marylou was watching Dean as she had watched him clear across the country and back, out of the corner of her eye - with a sullen, sad air, as though she wanted to cut off his head and hide it in her closet, an envious and rueful love of him so amazingly all himself, all raging and sniffy and crazy-wayed, a smile of tender dotage but also sinister envy that frightened me about her, a love she knew would never bear fruit because when she looked at his hangjawed bony face with its male self-containment and absentmindedness she knew he was too mad. Dean was convinced Marylou was a pathological liar. But when she watched him like this it was love too; and when Dean noticed he always turned with his big false flirtatious smile, with the eyelashes fluttering and the teeth pearly white, while a moment ago he was only dreaming in his eternity. Then Marylou and I both laughed - and Dean gave no sign of discomfiture, just a goofy glad grin that said to us, Ain't we gettin our kicks anyway? And that was it.

Jack Kerouac – On The Road, 155

A strange nailless finger

...he had suddenly recognised the outlying destination silently indicated to him by what looked like a strange, nailless finger (scrawled on a fence), and the true hiding-place of genuine, blinding opportunity.

Vladimir Nabokov - The Enchanter, 42

Memories lighted through the dead rooms

His memory of those times was like a house where no one lives and where the furniture has rotted away. But tonight it was as if lamps has been lighted through all the gloomy dead rooms. It had begun to happen when he saw Tico Feo coming through the dusk with his splendid guitar. Until that moment he had not been lonesome. Now, recognising his loneliness, he felt alive. He had not wanted to be alive. To be alive was to remember brown rivers where the fish run, and sunlight on a lady's hair.

Mr Schaeffer hung his head. The glare of the stars had made his eyes water.

Truman Capote - A Diamond Guitar, 128 (of Breakfast at Tiffany's, Penguin)

Bitter, not milk chocolate kindness

...this stern woman's kindness was not like milk chocolate, but like the bitter kind - a home without caresses, strict order, symptoms of fatigue, a favor for a friend grown burdensome...

Vladimir Nabokov - The Enchanter, 37

Every bit of hell imaginable

This does not mean that extra-coital love was innocent, angelic, child-like, pure: on the contrary, it contained every bit of hell imaginable in the world... Extra-coital love: a pot on fire, in which feeling boils to a passion, and makes the lid shake and dance like a soul possessed.

Milan Kundera - Immortality, 221