100% Dickens

"My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest. "

David Copperfield. Charles Dickens.

perfume

"Odors have a power of persuasion stronger than that of words, appearances, emotions, or will. The persuasive power of an odor cannot be fended off, it enters into us like breath into our lungs, it fills us up, imbues us totally. There is no remedy for it."

Patrick Süskind. Perfume. The Story of a Murderer.

I am a sick man...I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man.

...I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me.

[...]

I might foam at the mouth, but bring me a doll to play with, give me a cup of tea with sugar in it, and maybe I should be appeased. I might even be genuinely touched, though probably I should grind my teeth at myself afterwards and lie awake at night with shame for months after. That was my way.

Notes from the Underground. Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

19th century friendship

“But if the world separate itself from us, it leads us to find a world in ourselves and each other”

Charles Follen to Harriet Martineau, Nov. 30, 1835, Works, vol. I.

waste land

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

There is shadow under this red rock

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

T.S Eliot. The Waste Land.

gestures

"During the Age of Silence, people communicated more, not less. Basic survival demanded that the hands were almost never still, and so it was only during sleep (and sometimes not even then) that people were not saying something or other. No distinction was made between the gestures of language and the gestures of life."

Nicole Krauss, The History of Love.

samuel wakes

"Waking this morning out of my sleep on a sudden, I did with my elbow hit my wife a great blow over her face and nose, which waked her with pain, at which I was sorry, and to sleep again."

Samuel Pepys, Diarist, 1st January 1662.

choice

"A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance."

Hunter S. Thompson. The Proud Highway

time

"that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves"

Walter Pater.1873.