“I didn't want a world in which I had to choose between blind human babies and tortured monkey ones. To be frank, that's the sort of choice I expect science to protect me from, not give me.”

Source: Generation Loss (2007), Ch. 1
Context: I had from earliest childhood a sense that there was no skin between me and the world. I saw things other people didn't see. Hands that slipped through the gaps in the air like falling leaves; a jagged outline like a branch but there was no branch and no tree. In bed at night I heard a voice repeating my name in a soft, insistent monotone. Cass. Cass. Cass. My father took me to a doctor, who said I'd grow out of it. I never did, really.

Shock The Monkey
Song lyrics, Peter Gabriel (IV), Security (1982)

The Inferno (1917), Ch. XVI
Context: A stupor and a sort of shame overwhelmed me as I heard that man trying to extract the utmost entertainment possible from the dark happenings that had been torturing me for a month.
I thought of that great voice, now silenced, which had said so clearly and forcefully that the writers of to-day imitate the caricaturists.
I, who had penetrated into the heart of humanity and returned again, found nothing human in this jiggling caricature! It was so superficial that it was a lie.
He said in front of me — of me the awful witness:
"It is man stripped of all outward appearances that I want people to see. Others are fiction, I am the truth."

Song lyrics, Knocked Out Loaded (1986), Maybe Someday

Source: Gone With the Wind

Magnus Bane, to Luke Garroway, about Alec Lightwood, pg. 428
The Mortal Instruments, City of Heavenly Fire (2014)

Mirror
Song lyrics, Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers (2022)