A perfect lightning flash...adagio

The supposed great misery of our century is the lack of time; our sense of that, not a disinterested love of science, and certainly not wisdom, is why we devote such a huge proportion of the ingenuity and income of our societies to finding faster ways of doing things - as if the final aim of mankind was to grow closer not to a perfect humanity, but to a perfect lightning-flash. But for Charles, and for almost all his contemporaries and social peers, the time-signature over existence was firmly adagio.

John Fowles - The French Lieutenant's Woman, 18

A theme with variations

And that's life: it does not resemble a picaresque novel in which from one chapter to the next the hero is continually being surprised by new events that have no common denominator. It resembles a composition which musicians call: a theme with variations.

...Supposedly, astrology teaches us fatalism: you won't escape your fate! But in my view, astrology (please understand, astrology as a metaphor of life) says something far more subtle: you won't escape your life's theme! From this it follows, for example, that it is sheer illusion to want to start all over again, to begin 'a new life' that does not resemble the preceding one, to begin, so to speak, from zero. Your life will always be built from the same materials, the same bricks, the same problems, and what will seem to you at first 'a new life' will soon turn out to be just a variation of your old existence.

Milan Kundera - Immortality, 305

Peeled off the night

Now the light picked out the sides of the mountains in the opposite direction. Its huge sweeping orange circle peeled off the night, easily peeled off the night stuck to and wrapped around things.

...The earth and grass and runway turned the white of molten glass.

Ryu Murakami - Almost Transparent Blue, 69