How does a project mature?

It is obviously a most mysterious,
imperceptible process.
It carries on independently of ourselves,
in the subconscious,
crystallizing on the walls of the soul.
It is the form of the soul
that makes it unique,
indeed only the soul decides
the hidden 'gestation period' of that image
which cannot be perceived
by the conscious gaze.

Andrej Tarkovsky

But then, the sky!

Blue, untainted by a single cloud (the Ancients had such barbarous tastes given that their poets could have been inspired by such stupid, sloppy, silly-lingering clumps of vapour). I love - and I'm certain that I'm not mistaken if I say we love - skies like this, sterile and flawless! On days like these, the whole world is blown from the same shatterproof, everlasting glass as the glass of the Green Wall and of all our structures. On days like these, you can see to the very blue depths of things, to their unknown surfaces, those marvelous expressions of mathematical equality - which exist in even the most usual and everyday objects.

Yevgeny Zamyatin. We.

Ruskies know stuff

“You can waken people only by dreaming their dreams

more clearly than they dream them themselves”

and....

"It would be extremely interesting

to write the history of laughter"

Alexander Herzen.

These people

have learned not from books, but in the fields, in the wood, on the river bank. Their teachers have been the birds themselves, when they sang to them, the sun when it left a glow of crimson behind it at setting, the very trees, and wild herbs.

Anton Chekhov. A Day in the Country.

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.