You can tell when a war starts,

but when does the prewar start?

If there are rules about that, we should pass them on.

Hand them down inscribed in clay, in stone.

What would they say?

Among other things they would say:

Do not let your own people deceive you.

(From Cassandra; A Novel by Christa Wolf)

Better a thousand times take one’s chance with death, than accept a life one did not want. But best of all to persist and persist, and persist for ever, till one were satisfied in life.

From Women in Love, by D. H. Lawrence

But when it comes to thought, it is I who continue it, I who unwind it. I exist. I think I exist. Oh, how long and serpentine this feeling of existing is – and I unwind it, slowly….If only I could prevent myself from thinking! I try, I succeed: it seems as if my head is filling with smoke….And now it starts again: ‘Smoke…. Mustn’t think…. I don’t want to think….I think that I don’t want to think. I mustn’t think that I don’t want to think. Because it is still a thought. Will there never be an end to it?

My thought is me: that is why I can’t stop. I exist by what I think… and I can’t prevent myself from thinking.

From Nausea, by Jean-Paul Sartre

It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self – never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardour of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted.

From Middelmarch, by George Elliot

With great difficulty, advancing by millimetres each year, I carve a road out of the rock.  For millennia my teeth have wasted and my nails broken to get there, to the other side, to the light and open air. And now that my hands bleed and my teeth tremble, unsure , in a cavity cracked by thirst and dust, I pause and contemplate my work: I have spent the second part of my life breaking the stones, drilling the walls, smashing the doors and removing the obstacles, I placed between the light and myself in the first part of my life.”

 

(Octavio Paz – selected poems Penguin books , 1979)

 

“The businessman who assumes that life is everything, and the mystic who asserts that it is nothing, fail, on this side and on that, to hit the truth. ‘yes , I see, dear; it is about halfway between........No; truth, being alive, was not halfway between anything. It was only to be found by continuous excursions into their realm, and though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to ensure sterility.”

(From Howards End; A novel by E. M. Forster)