What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.
-Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
“I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
“I was within and without. Simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
No man for any considerable period can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.
-Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.
-Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life.… [Gatsby had] an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
“With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to the truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two.”
– Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
“Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.” -Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (not exactly literary, but close enough…)
“Those secret tastes, defeated in the past by oranges and rhubarb, broke out into an irrepressible urge when she began to weep. She went back to eating earth. The first time she did it almost out of curiosity, sure that the bad taste would be the best cure for the temptation. And, in fact, she could not bear the earth in her mouth. But she persevered, overcome by the growing anxiety, and little by little she was getting back to her ancestral appetite, the taste of primary minerals, the unbridled satisfaction of what was the original food.
-Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
AND, LAST BUT NOT LEAST (I LIKE IT ENOUGH THAT IT’S TATOOED ON THE BACK OF MY CALVE…WELL, to be precise “…more, Horatio…’ is poorly executed there, which leads to the most common comment I get about it usually having to do with whether I have had a beau named “Horatio”…ANSWER: No.):
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreampt of in your philosophy.”
-William Shakespeare, Hamlet
taragarten 