Reluctant passion is plain for all to see

Incipient and reluctant passion is plain for all to see; a love that's satisfied knows how to hide itself away.

Voltaire - Zadig, 148 (of Candide and Other Stories, Oxford World's Classics)

A private little sun for her soul to bask in

And as each and all of them were warmed without by the sun, so each of them had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, at least some remote and distant hope which, though perhaps starving to nothing, still lived on, as hopes will.

Thomas Hardy - Tess of the D'Urbervilles, 14

Morning light, scarfed in sun-dazzle

...Then whoever wants to
may go bravely to mead, when morning light,
scarfed in sun-dazzle, shines forth from the south,
and brings another daybreak to the world.

Beowulf, ll. 603-606, p20 (of Seamus Heaney's translation)

Except to get out of hell

No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.

Antonin Artaud - Van Gogh, Suicided by Society

Private language and common memories

England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare's much-quoted message, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in control - that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.

George Orwell - The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, 30 (of Why I Write, Penguin's Great Ideas series)

To shun the heaven

Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight;
Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad:
Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

William Shakespeare - Sonnet 129, Sonnets (267, The Norton Anthology of Poetry)

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

Neon arabesques

So we pour it in a Pernod bottle and start for New Orleans past iridescent lakes and orange gas flares, and swamps and garbage heaps, alligators crawling around in broken bottles and tin cans, neon arabesques of motels, marooned pimps scream obscenities at passing cars from islands of rubbish...

New Orleans is a dead museum.

William Burroughs - Naked Lunch, 13

Beautiful things in black letters

There was a time when, if I had had to opt between two types of blindness, I would have chosen to be blind to the splendour of the sea, the mountains, the sunset in Rio de Janeiro, so as to have eyes to read beautiful things in black letters on a white background.

Chico Buarque - Budapest, 98

Engraved in the light

For the dark finds ways of being engraved in the light.

Emiliana Torrini - Serenade