The future shadowed their present, like the sun coming through the many-veined transparent vine leaf; a criss-cross of lines making no pattern.

— Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts

What is life but a form of motion and a journey through a foreign world? Moreover locomotion — the privilege of animals — is perhaps the key to intelligence.

. . . In animals the power of locomotion changes all this pale experience [i.e., that of vegetables] into a life of passion; and it is on passion, although we anaemic philosophers are apt to forget it, that intelligence is grafted. Intelligence is a venture inconceivably daring and wonderfully successful; it is an attempt, and a victorious attempt, to be in two places at once. . . . [I]t is the possibility of travel that lends a meaning to the images of the eye and the mind, which otherwise would be mere feelings and a dull state of oneself. By tempting the animal to move, these images become signs for something ulterior, something to be seized and enjoyed. They sharpen his attention and lead him to imagine other aspects which the same thing might afford; so that instead of saying that the possession of hands has given men his superiority, it would go much deeper to say that man, and all other animals, owe their intelligence to their feet.

… [T]he world is too much with us, and we are too much with ourselves. We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure haphazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.

. . . The most prosaic objects, the most common people and incidents, seen as a panorama of ordered motions, of perpetual journeys by night and day, through a hundred storms, over a thousand bridges and tunnels, take on an epic grandeur, and the mechanism moves so nimbly that it seems to live. It has the fascination, to me at least inexhaustible, of prows cleaving the water, wheels turning, planets ascending and descending the skies: things not alive in themselves but friendly to life, promising us security in motion, power in art, novelty in necessity.

The lateste type of traveller, and the most notorious, is the tourist. Having often been one myself, I will throw no stones at him; from the tripper off on a holiday to the eager pilgrim thirsting for facts or for beauty, all tourists are dear to Hermes, the god of travel, who is patron also of amiable curiousity and freedom of mind. There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor. I do not think that frivolity and dissipation of mind and aversion from one’s birthplace, or the aping of foreign manners and arts are serious diseases: they kill, but they do not kill anybody worth saving. There may be in them sometimes a sigh of regret for the impossible, a bit of pathetic homage to an ideal one is condemned to miss; but as a rule they spring not from too much familiarity with alien things but from too little: the last thing a man wishes who really tastes the savour of anything and understands its roots is to generalise or to transplant it; and the more arts and manners a good traveler has assimilated, the more depth and pleasantness he will see in the manners and arts of his own home. Ulysses remembered Ithaca. With a light heart and a clear mind he would have admitted that Troy was unrivalled in grandeur, Phaeacia in charm, and Calypso in enchantment: that could not make the sound of the waves breaking on his own shores less pleasant to his ears; it could only render more enlightened, more unhesitating, his choice of what was naturally his. The human heart is local and finite, it has roots: and if the intellect radiates from it, according to its strength, to greater and greater distances, the reports, if they are to be gathered up at all, must be gathered up at the centre. A man who knows the world cannot covet the world; and if he were not content with his lot in it (which after all has included that saving knowledge) he would be showing little respect for all those alien perfections which he professes to admire. They were all local, all finite, all cut off from being anything but what they happened to be; and if such limitation and such arbitrariness were beautiful there, he has but to dig down to the principle of his own life, and clear it of all confusion and indecision, in order to bring it to perfect expression after its kind: and then wise travellers will come also to his city, and praise its name.

Only for a moment; but it was enough. It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush when one tried to check and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores! Then, for that moment, she had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard softened. It was over — the moment.

— Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world’s turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man’s will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.

Lost ye way in the dark, said the old man. He stirred the fire, standing slender tusks of bone up out of the ashes.

The kid didn’t answer.

The old man swung his head back and forth. The way of the transgressor is hard. God made this world, but he didn’t make it to suit everybody, did he?

I don’t believe he much had me in mind.

Aye, said the old man. But where does a man come by his notions. What world’s he seen that he liked better?

I can think of better places and better ways.

Can ye make it be?

No.

No. It’s a mystery. A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he don’t want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it. You believe that?

I dont know.

Believe that.

— Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

You stimulate him to take pleasure in praising you, because have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they can find peace in you.
I.1

Can I find a place outside heaven and earth so that there my god may come to me?
I.2

And when you are poured out over us, it is not you who are brought low but us who are raised up, not you who are scattered but us who are brought together.
I.3

And in all this what have I said, my God, my Life, my holy sweetness? What does any man succeed in saying when he attempts to speak of you? Yet woe to those who do not speak of you at all, when those who speak most say nothing.
I.4

What am I to you, that you should demand to be loved by me?

Do not hide your face from me. Let me die, lest I should die indeed; only let me see your face.
I.5

For what do I want to say, O Lord, except that I do not know where I came from into this mortal life or (should I say?) into this vital death.

And since Thy years do not fail, your years are Today.

But Thou art still the same, and all things of tomorrow and after tomorrow, all things of yesterday and before yesterday, you will accomplish today and have accomplished today. What does it matter to me if someone finds this incomprehensible? I should like him too to rejoice as he says: “What does this mean?” Yes; this is the way I should like him to rejoice, preferring to find you in his uncertainty rather than in his certainty to miss you.
I.6

For when still a boy I began to call upon you, my Help and my Refuge, and in praying to you I broke through the knots of language.
I.9

“Let him have a few more wounds: he is not well yet.”

. . . wave after great wave of temptation seemed to be hanging over me after my boyhood. My mother could see them coming and she preferred to expose them to the mere clay out of which I might afterward be reshaped, rather than the express image itself.
I.11

. . . every inordinate affection should be its own punishment.
I.12

How imperceptive her religion made her! The fumes of that incense obscured the human heart. Skimming the surface, she ignored the battle in the mud.

— Virginia Woolf, Between the Bars

For a few hours now the police would have their hands full looking after something as trivial as the lives of the city’s inhabitants and their reputations were temporarily in no danger. But if some, their fears allayed, remained in Jupien’s establishment, others were tempted not so much by the thought of recovering their moral liberty as by the darkness that had suddenly settled upon the streets.Some of these, like the Pompeians upon whom the fire from heaven was already raining, descended into the passages of the Metro, black as catacombs. They knew that they would not be alone there. And darkness, which envelops all things like a new element, has the effect, irresistibly tempting for certain people, of suppressing the first halt on the road to pleasure — it permits us to enter without impediment into a region of caresses to which normally we gain access only after a certain delay. Whether the coveted object is a man or a woman, supposing even that the first approach is easy and that there is no need of the galant speeches which in a drawing room might run on forever (at any rate in daylight), on a normal evening, even in the most dimly lit street, there is at least a preamble in which the eyes alone feed on the unripe fruit, and fear of passers-by, fear even of the coveted being, prevents us from doing more than look and speak. In the darkness this time-honoured ritual is instantly abolished — hands, lips, bodies may go into action at once. There is always the excuse of darkness, and of the mistakes that darkness engenders, if we are not well received. And if we are, this immediate response of the body which does not withdrawbut approaches, gives us of the woman (or the man) whom we have selected the idea that she is without prejudices and full of vice, which adds an extra pleasure to the happiness of having bitten straight into the fruit without first coveting it with our eyes and without asking permission. Meanwhile the darkness persisted; plunged into the new element, imagining that they had travelled to a distant country and were witnessing a natural phenomenon like a tidal wave or an eclipse, that they were enjoying not an artificially prepared, sedentary pleasure but a chance encounter in the unknown, the men who had come away from Jupien’s house celebrated, while the bombs mimicked the rumbling of a volcano, deep in the earth as in a Pompeian house of ill fame, their secret rites in the shadows of the catacombs.

— Proust, Time Regained

The hope of [the strong Nietzschean poet] is that what the past tried to do to her she will succeed in doing to the past: to make the past itself, including those very causal processes which blindly impressed all her own behaving, bear her impress. Success in that enterprise — the enterprise of saying ‘Thus I willed it’ to the past – is success in what Bloom calls ‘giving birth to oneself’.

— Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity

At this early hour of a June morning the library was empty. Mrs. Giles had to visit the kitchen. Mr. Oliver still tramped the terrace. And Mrs. Swithin was of course at church. The light but variable breeze, foretold by the weather expert, flapped the yellow curtain, tossing light, then shadow. The fire greyed, then glowed, and the tortoiseshell butterfly beat on the lower pane of the window; beat, beat, beat; repeating that if no human being ever came, never, never, never, the books would be mouldy, the fire out and the tortoiseshell butterfly dead on the pane.

Heralded by the impetuosity of the Afghan hound, the old man entered. He had read his paper; he was drowsy; and so sank down into the chintz-covered chair with the dog at his feet — the Afghan hound. His nose on his paws, his haunches drawn up, he looked a stone dog, a crusader’s dog, guarding even in the realms of death the sleep of his master. But the master was not dead; only dreaming; drowsily, seeing as in a glass, its lustre spotted, himself, a young man helmeted; and a cascade falling. But no water; and the hills, like grey stuff pleated; and in the sand a hoop of ribs; a bullock maggot-eaten in the sun; and in the shadow of the rock, savages; and in his hand a gun. The dream hand clenched; the real hand lay on the chair arm, the veins swollen but only with brownish fluid now.

— Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts

[In his rejection of objective, absolute Truth, Nietzsche] did not give up the idea that an individual might track home the blind impress all his behavings bore. He only rejected the idea that this tracking was a process of discovery. In his view, in achieving this sort of self-knowledge we are not coming to know a truth which was out there (or in here) all the time. Rather, he sees self-knowledge as self-creation. The process of coming to know oneself, confronting one’s contingency, tracking one’s causes home, is identical with the process of inventing a new language – that is, of thinking up some new metaphors. For any literal description of one’s individuality, which is to say any use of an inherited language-game for this purpose, will necessarily fail. One will not have traced that idiosyncrasy home but will merely have managed to see it as not idiosyncratic after all, as a specimen reiterating a type, a copy or replica of something which has already been identified.

— Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity