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“...he brought the hand to his face, then quickly drew a line across the misted-over window. A woman's eye floated up before him. He almost called out in astonishment. But he had been dreaming, and when he came to himself he saw that it was only the reflection in the window of the girl opposite. Outside it was growing dark, and the lights had been turned on in the train, transforming the window into a mirror. The mirror had been clouded over with steam until he drew the line across it...

In the depths of the mirror the evening landscape moved by, the mirror and the reflected figures like motion pictures superimposed one on the other. The figures and the background were unrelated, and yet the figures, transparent and intangible, and the background, dim in the gathering darkness, melted together into a sort of symbolic world not of this world. Particularly when a light out in the mountains shone in the center of the girl's face, Shimamura felt his chest rise at the inexpressible beauty of it.”

-- Snow Country, Yasunari Kawabata

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“For a long time I would go to bed early. Sometimes, the candle barely out, my eyes closed so quickly that I did not have time to tell myself: “I’m falling asleep.” And half an hour later the thought that it was time to look for sleep would awaken me; I would make as if to put away the book which I imagined was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been reading, but these thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was the immediate subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V. This impression would persist for some moments after I awoke; it did not offend my reason, but lay like scales upon my eyes and prevented them from registering the fact that the candle was no longer burning. Then it would begin to seem unintelligible, as the thoughts of a previous existence must be after reincarnation; the subject of my book would separate itself from me, leaving me free to apply myself to it or not; and at the same time my sight would return and I would be astonished to find myself in a state of darkness, pleasant and restful enough for my eyes, but even more, perhaps, for my mind, to which it appeared incomprehensible, without a cause, something dark indeed.”

-- Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust

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“A doctor from Yvetot, with whom he had recently found himself in consultation, had humiliated him at the very bedside of the patient, in front of the assembled relatives. When Charles told her the story, that evening, Emma flew into a rage against his colleague. Charles was moved. He kissed her on the forehead with a tear. But she was fuming with shame; she wanted to strike him, she went into the hallway to open the window, and breathed in the cool air to calm herself.

‘What a pathetic man! What a pathetic man!’ she said softly, biting her lips.

She was feeling more irritated by him anyway. With age, he was developing coarse habits; at dessert, he would cut up the corks of the empty bottles; after eating, he would run his tongue over his teeth; when swallowing his soup, he would make a gurgling sound with each mouthful; and because he was beginning to grow stout, his eyes, already small, seemed to have been pushed up toward his temples by the swelling of his cheeks.

Emma would sometimes tuck the red edge of his sweater back inside his vest, straighten his cravat, or toss aside the faded gloves he was preparing to put on; and this was not, as he thought, for his sake; it was for herself, in an extension of her own egotism, a nervous vexation. Sometimes, too, she would talk to him about the things she had read, such as a passage from a novel, a new play, or the high society anecdote being recounted in the paper; for, after all, Charles was someone, always an open ear, always a ready approbation. She confided many secrets to her greyhound! She would have done the same to the logs in the fireplace and the pendulum of the clock.

Deep in her soul, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a sailor in distress, she would gaze out over the solitude of her life with desperate eyes, seeking some white sail in the mists of the far-off horizon. She did not know what this chance event would be, what wind would drive it to her, what shore it would carry her to, whether it was a longboat or a three-decked vessel, loaded with anguish or filled with happiness up to the portholes. But each morning, when she awoke, she hoped it would arrive that day, and she would listen to every sound, spring to her feet, feel surprised that it did not come; then, at sunset, always more sorrowful, she would wish the next day were already there.”

-- Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert

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“Now they talked more often about things unconcerned with their love; and the letters Emma sent him were full of flowers, verses, the moon and the stars, as she naïvely attempted to revive her weakened passion with external stimulants. She kept promising herself that on her next trip, she would be profoundly happy; then she would admit that she had not felt anything extraordinary. This disappointment would fade quickly in the presence of fresh hope, and Emma would return to him more ardent, more avid. She would undress roughly, tearing the thin string of her corset, which would whistle around her hips like a slithering snake. She would stand on the tips of her bare toes to see one more time that the door was locked, the drop all her clothes in a single motion; -- and, pale speechless, solemn, she would collapse against his chest with a long shudder.

But on that forehead beaded with cold droplets, on those stammering lips, in those wild eyes, in the clasp of those arms, there was something extreme, undefined, and bleak that seemed to Léon to slip subtly between them as though to separate them.

He did not dare question her; but, discerning how experienced she was, he would say to himself that she must have passed through every ordeal of suffering and pleasure. What had once charmed him he now found a little frightening. Moreover, he rebelled against the absorption, greater and greater every day, of his personality. He resented Emma for this perpetual victory. He even tried to stop loving her; then, at the creak of her little boots, he would feel himself a coward, like a drunkard at the sight of strong liquor.

She did not fail, it is true, to lavish on him on him all kinds of attentions, from delicacies for the table to coquetries in dress and dreamy glances. She brought roses from Yonville in her bosom and tossed them in his face; she worried over his health, gave him advice about how to conduct himself; and in order to keep a firmer hold on him, hoping that heaven would perhaps intervene, she hung around his neck a medal of the Virgin. She informed herself, like a virtuous mother, about his friends. She would say to him: 

`Don't see them, don't go out, think only about us; love me!'

She would have liked to be able to keep a constant eye on him, and it occurred to her to have him followed in the streets. Near the hotel, there was a sort of tramp who was always accosting travelers and who would not refuse . . . But her pride rebelled.

'Oh, too bad! If he's deceiving me, what do I care! Does it matter to me?'

One day when they had left each other early, and she was walking back alone down the boulevard, she caught sight of the walls of her convent; she sat down on the bench, in the shade of the elms. How peaceful those days had been! How she had longed for the indescribable feelings of love that she had tried, with the help of her books, to imagine for herself!

The first months of her marriage, her horseback rides in the forest, the Vicomte waltzing, and Lagardy singing, all passed before her eyes again . . . And suddenly Léon appeared to her as far removed as the others.

'And yet I love him!' she said to herself.

It didn't matter. She was not happy and never had been. Why was life so inadequate, why did the things she depended on turn immediate to dust? . . .”

-- Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert

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“...That September I picked up The Washington Post and saw that the PG County police had killed again. I could not help but think that this could have been me, and holding you--a month old by then--I knew that such loss would not be mine alone...on the third day a photo appeared with the story, and I glimpsed at and then focused on the portrait, and I saw him there. He was dressed in his formal clothes, as though it were his senior prom, and frozen in the amber of his youth. His face was lean, brown, and beautiful, and across that face, I saw the open, easy smile of Prince Carmen Jones....

...Days later, your mother and I packed you into the car, drove down to Washington, left you with your aunt Kamilah, and went to the service for Prince at Rankin Chapel...

...I remember Dr. Mable Jones, Prince's mother, speaking of her son's death as a call to move from her comfortable suburban life into activism. I heard several people ask for forgiveness for the officer who'd shot Prince Jones down. I only vaguely recall my impressions of all this. But I know that I have always felt great distance from the grieving rituals of my people, and I must have felt it powerfully then. The need to forgive the officer would not have moved me, because even then, in some inchoate form, I knew that Prince was not killed by a single officer so much as he was murdered by his country and all the fears that have marked it from birth.”

-- Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates

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Warning: spoiler for Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami

“I telephoned Midori. ‘I have to talk to you,’ I said. ‘I have a million things to talk to you about. A million things we have to talk about. All I want in this world is you. I want to see you and talk. I want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning.’

Midori responded with a long, long silence -- the silence of all the misty rain in the world falling on all the new-mown lawns of the world. Forehead pressed against the glass, I shut my eyes and waited. At last, Midori’s quiet voice broke the silence: “Where are you now?”

Where was I now?

Gripping the receiver, I raised my head and turned to see what lay beyond the telephone booth. Where was I now? I had no idea. No idea at all. Where was this place? All that flashed into my eyes were the countless shapes of people walking by to nowhere. Again and again, I called out for Midori from the dead center of this place that was no place.”

-- Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami 

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The Stalker is leading a professor and a writer into a mysterious restricted area called the “Zone” to reach a room that has the power to fulfill the deepest desires of anyone who enters. He gives the following monologue while on the journey.

STALKER:

Let everything that's been planned come true. Let them believe. And let them have a laugh at their passions. Because what they call passion is only the friction between their souls and the outside world. And above all, let them believe in themselves and become helpless like children, because weakness is great, and strength is worthless. When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible, when he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a tree is growing, it's tender and pliant, but when it's dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death's companions. Pliancy and weakness express the freshness of living. Because what has hardened will never win.

-- Stalker, a film by Andrei Tarkovsky

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“The sherpas start down immediately; they, too, seem oppressed by so much emptiness. Left alone, I am overtaken by that northern void--no wind, no cloud, no track, no bird, only the crystal crescents between peaks, the ringing monuments of rock that, freed from the talons of ice and snow, thrust an implacable being into the blue. In the early light, the rock shadows on the snow are sharp; in the tension between light and dark is the power of the universe. This stillness to which all returns, this is reality, and soul and sanity have no more meaning here than a gust of snow; such transience and insignificance are exalting, terrifying, all at once, like the sudden discovery, in meditation, of one's own transparence. Snow mountains, more than sea or sky, serve as a mirror to one's own true being, utterly still, utterly clear, a void, an Emptiness without life or sound that carries in Itself all life, all sound. Yet as long as I remain an "I" who is conscious of the void and stands apart from it, there will remain a snow mist on the mirror.

A silhouette crosses the white wastes below, a black coil dangling from its hand. It is Dawa Sherpa carrying tump line and headband, yet in this light, a something moves that is much more than Dawa. The sun is roaring, it fills to bursting each crystal of snow. I flush with feeling, moved beyond my comprehension, and once again, the warm tears freeze upon my face. These rocks and mountains, all this matter, the snow itself, the air--the earth is ringing. All is moving, full of power, full of light.”

-- Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen