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. . . your suffering won't mark you out as special, though your response to it might.

— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

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And a change in the weather is enough to create the world and ourselves afresh.

— Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, trans. by Mark Treharne

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We make a point of telling ourselves that death can come at any moment, but when we do so we think of that moment as something vague and distant, not as something that can have anything to do with the day that has already begun or might meant that death — or the first signs of its partial possessions of us, after which it will never loosen its hold again — will occur this very afternoon, the almost inevitable afternoon, with its hourly activities prescribed in advance.

— Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, trans. by Mark Treharne

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. . . in the liquid, icy air that bathed the chestnuts and planes on the boulevards and the tree in the courtyard of our house, the narcissi, the daffodils, the anemones of the Ponte Vecchio were already beginning to open as in a bowl of clear water.

— Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, trans. by Mark Treharne

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For a second, rehearing the warbling from some distant springtime, we can extract from it, as from the little tubes of color used in painting, the precise tint — forgotten, mysterious, and fresh — of the days we thought we remembered when, like bad painters, we were in fact spreading our whole past on a single canvas and painting it with the conventional monochrome of voluntary memory.

— Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, trans. by Mark Treharne

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Sometimes I get mail for people who lived in my home before I did, and sometimes my own body seems like a home through which successive people have passed like tenants, leaving behind memories, habits, scars, skills, and other souvenirs.

— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

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The whiteness of the page before it is written on and after it is erased is and is not the same white, and the silence before a word is spoken and after is and is not the same silence.

— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

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Life is real again, and the useless and cumbersome and mischievous have to die. They ought to die. They ought to be willing to die.

— H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

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Then suddenly a chance, the passing of something — I knew not what — and then a stillness that could be felt. Nothing but this gaunt quiet.

— H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

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And I recall now with a sort of wonder that, in spite of the infinite danger in which we were between starvation and a still more terrible death, we could yet struggle bitterly for that horrible privilege of sight.

— H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

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When I think back on it, I see myself the way you remember yourself in events of long ago, a small figure amid a rough landscape of glaciers, waterfalls, lava rocks, rain, clouds, birds, islands, and books. Always, just beyond all these things, was the silver sea, the lace border around all land like the silence around all sounds or the unknowns beyond all knowledge.

— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

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To hear is to let the sound wander all the way through the labyrinth of your ear; to listen is to travel the other way to meet it.

— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

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To have something is to say one thing; to have someone who hears it is another. To be heard literally is to have the vibrations of the air travel through the labyrinth of the listener's ear to the mind, but more must unfold in that darkness. You choose to hear what corresponds to your desires, needs, and interests, and there are dangers in a world that corresponds too well, with curating your life into a mirror that reflects only the comfortable and familiar, and dangers in the opposite direction as well.

— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

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Reading is also traveling, the eyes running along the length of an idea, which can be folded up into the compressed space of a book and unfolded within your imagination and your understanding.

— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

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Only those whom Fate had laid low, those who suffer, the disadvantaged, the wretched and insecure, the unlovely, the humbled among us, only they can truly be blessed by love. Dedicate your life to them, and you truly restore what life has taken from them. They alone know how to love, and how to be loved as we truly should love and be loved — in gratitude, in humility.

— Stefan Zweig, Beware of Pity, trans. by Jonathan Katz

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. . . in those days it had never occurred to me that every form of love, even the most laughable and absurd, is in fact the destiny of some human being, and that even indifference can place you in love’s debt.

— Stefan Zweig, Beware of Pity, trans. by Jonathan Katz

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Stories migrate; meanings migrate; everything metamorphoses.

— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby