But while the blood still throbs through my writing hand, you are still as much part of blessed matter as I am. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share.

Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.

Gilbert K. Chesterton (Tremendous Trifles)

Es tan corto el amor, y es tan largo el olvido.

Love is so short and forgetting is so long.

Pablo Neruda, (excerpt from Veinte Poemas de Amor y una Canción Desesperada, Poema XX: Puedo Escribir)

We all have such fateful objects—it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another—carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of special significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane’s heart always break.

Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

Now the Sirens have
a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence…
Someone might possibly have escaped from their singing;
but from their silence certainly never.

Franz Kafka (The Silence of the Sirens)

Gifts allow us to demonstrate exactly how little we know about a person, and nothing pisses off a person more than being shoved in the wrong pigeonhole.

House M.D., It’s A Wonderful Lie, 2008

—Sovegna vos al temps de mon dolor
    Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina.

—Be mindful in due time of my sorrow,
    Then dove he back into that fire which refines them.

T.S. Eliot (appears as an epigraph in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: Prufrock Among the Women taken from Dante’s Purgatorio, Canto XXVI)

Rien n’empêche le bonheur comme le souvenir du bonheur.

Nothing prevents happiness like the memory of happiness.

André Gide (L’Immoraliste)

Que serait le récit du bonheur? Rien, que ce qui le prépare, puis ce qui le détruit, ne se raconte.

What would there be in a story of happiness? Only what prepares it, only what destroys it can be told.

Andre Gidé (L’Immoraliste)

I have a friend who’s an artist and he’s sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say, “Look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree, I think. And he says—“you see, I as an artist can see how beautiful this is, but you as a scientist, oh, take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing.” And I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me, too, I believe, although I might not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is; but I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time I see much more about the flower than he sees. I can imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension of one centimeter, there is also beauty at a smaller dimension, the inner structure. Also the processes, the fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting—it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: Does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which shows that a science knowledge only adds to the excitement and mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds; I don’t understand how it subtracts.

Richard Feynman (The Pleasure of Finding Things Out)