Never Quotes (page 245)
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During the terrible years of the Yekhov terror I spent seventeen months in the prison queues in Leningrad. One day someone ‘identified’ me. Then a woman with lips blue with cold who was standing behind me, and of course had never heard of my name, came out of the numbness which affected us all and whispered in my ear—(we all spoke in whispers there):
‘Could you describe this?’
I said, ‘I can!’
Then something resembling a smile slipped over what had once been her face.
Anna Akhmatova
I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless emptiness.
Jack Kerouac
...and a dream away in space with neither her nor there where all the footsteps ever fell can never fare nearer to anywhere nor from anywhere further away. Nor for in the end again by degrees or as though switched on dark falls there again that certain dark that alone certain ashes can. Through it who knows yet another end beneath a cloudless sky of a last end if ever there had to be another absolutely had to be.
Samuel Beckett
People never seemed to notice that, by saving time, they were losing something else. No one cared to admit that life was becoming ever poorer, bleaker and more monotonous. The ones who felt this most keenly were the children, because no one had time for them anymore. But time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart. And the more people saved, the less they had.
Michael Ende
She was a lovely lady, with a romantic mind and such a sweet mocking mouth. Her romantic mind was like the tiny boxes, one within the other, that come from the puzzling East, however many you discover there is always one more; and her sweet mocking mouth had one kiss on it that Wendy could never get, though there it was, perfectly conspicuous in the right-hand corner.
J. M. Barrie