1990s, The Rum Diary (1998)
Context: By the time we got to the street, I could see the first rays of the sun, a cool pink glow in the eastern sky. The fact that I’d spent all night in a cell and a courtroom made that morning one of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. There was a peace and brightness about it, a chilly Caribbean dawn after a night in a filthy jail. I looked out at the ships and the sea beyond them, and I felt crazy to be free with a whole day ahead of me.
Then I realized I would sleep most of the day, and my excitement disappeared.
“Sadly, almost with terror, I often looked at the threadlike path which I saw, lower down, winding in the valleys and disappearing between the mountains. The day would come when it would lead me back to the sorrowful world that existed beyond the distant hill ranges, and so thinking, an indescribable suffering lay hold of me.”
Magic And Mystery In Tibet
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Alexandra David-Néel 5
French explorer, spiritualist, Buddhist, anarchist and writ… 1868–1969Related quotes
Quote from Friedrich's Diary-note, 1803; as cited by C. D. Eberlein in C. D. Friedrich - Bekenntnisse, pp. 72-73; translated and quoted by Linda Siegel in Caspar David Friedrich and the Age of German Romanticism, Boston Branden Press Publishers, 1978, p. 45
1794 - 1840
Quote of Moore, 1978; as cited in Henry Moore writings and Conversations, ed. Alan Wilkinson, University of California Press, California 2002, pp. 32-33
1970 and later
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 410.
New York Times (July 2, 2004)
Context: When I lie on the beach there naked, which I do sometimes, and I feel the wind coming over me and I see the stars up above and I am looking into this very deep, indescribable night, it is something that escapes my vocabulary to describe. Then I think: 'God, I have no importance. Whatever I do or don't do, or what anybody does, is not more important than the grains of sand that I am lying on, or the coconut that I am using for my pillow.' So I really don't think in the long sense.
Psyche
Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (1956)
Je voudrais, un jour, avoir un nom si connu, si populaire, si célèbre, si glorieux enfin, qu'il m'authorisât, à p[éter] dans le monde, et que le monde trouvât ça tout naturel.
Quoted in the Journals of Jules and Edmond de Goncourt, also known as Mémoires de la vie littéraire, vol. I http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14799/14799-8.txt (1887), translated by Lewis Galantière, entry for 1855-10-13.