Funny how we think of romance as always involving two, when the romance of solitude can be ever so much more delicious and intense. Alone, the world offers itself freely to us. To be unmasked, it has no choice.
Still Life with Woodpecker, Tom Robbins

There is nothing like silence to suggest a sense of unlimited space. Sounds lend colour to space, and confer a sort of sound body upon it. But absence of sound leaves it quite pure and, in the silence, we are seized with the sensation of something vast and deep and boundless. It took complete hold of me and, for several moments, I was overwhelmed by the grandeur of this shadowy peace.
Malicroix, Henri Bosco

Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.
The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion

My pain is so deep that it never had a cause nor does it lack a cause now. What could have been its cause? Where is that thing so important that it might stop being its cause? Its cause is nothing; nothing could have stopped being its cause.
Notebooks, Cesar Vallejo

I had only a little time left and I didn’t want to waste it on God.
The Outsider, Albert Camus

‘Have you no hope at all? And do you really live with the thought that when you die, you die, and nothing remains?’ ‘Yes,’ I said.
The Outsider, Albert Camus

He said firmly, ‘God can help you. All the men I’ve seen in your position turned to Him in their time of trouble.’ Obviously, I replied, they were at liberty to do so, if they felt like it. I, however, didn’t want to be helped, and I hadn’t time to work up interest for something that didn’t interest me.
The Outsider, Albert Camus

Can I possibly not understand myself that I am a lost man? But why wouldn’t I be able to resurrect? Yes! It only takes being calculating and patient at least once in your life and that’s all! It only takes being steadfast at least once, and in an hour I can change my whole destiny!
The Gambler, Fyodor Dostoyevsky

To be enslaved to you is a pleasure. There is, there is also pleasure in the ultimate degree of humiliation and insignificance.
The Gambler, Fyodor Dostoyevsky

If she had ordered me to throw myself down then, I would have done it. If she had said it only as a joke, said it with contempt, spitting on me; even then I would have jumped.
The Gambler, Fyodor Dostoyevsky