In the first week of April the weather turned suddenly unseasonably, insistently lovely. The sky was blue, the air warm and windless, and the sun beamed on the muddy ground with all the sweet impatience of June.

- Donna Tartt, The Secret History (1992).

R Leporis, The Vampire’s Star

I suffered most from the feeling that custom was daily petrifying our lives into one fixed shape, that our minds were losing their freedom and becoming enslaved to the steady passionless course of time.

- Leo Tolstoy, Family Happiness

- Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask

“The sociable will be happy, or almost happy with a thing, whatever it may be, from the moment they have found in their spirit a communicable and pleasing way to express it. The solitary, however, have their enjoyment or their torment of a thing in silence. They hate the clever and glittering display of their innermost problems as they hate to see their beloved too carefully dressed. This is the jealousy which all solitary thinkers and passionate dreamers feel towards esprit.”
—Daybreak, §524 (edited).

Peter Beard, Francis Bacon, 80 Narrow Street, London, 1972