“Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. You may fancy yourself safe, and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a piece of music that you had ceased to play - I tell you Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.”

― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.”

― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under.

1. 1.The first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other words, for the look of the public.
   

2. 2.The second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes. They are the tireless hosts of cocktail parties and dinners. They are happier than the people in the first category, who, when they lose their public, have the feeling that the lights have gone out in the room of their lives. This happens to nearly all of them sooner or later. People in the second category, on the other hand, can always come up with the eyes they need.
   

3. 3.Then there is the third category, the category of people who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love. Their situation is as dangerous as the situation of people in the first category. one day the eyes of their beloved will close, and the room will go dark.
   

4. 4. And finally there is the fourth category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers.”
   

― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Il più solido piacere di questa vita, è il piacere vano delle illusioni.”

― Giacomo Leopardi

“ J'ai vu des archipels sidéraux! et des îles

Dont les cieux délirants sont ouverts au vogueur:

- Est-ce en ces nuits sans fonds que tuu dors et t'exiles,

Million d'oiseaux d'or, ô future Vigueur?

Mais, vrai, j'ai trop pleuré! Les Aubes sont navrantes.

Toute lune est atroce et tout soleil amer:

L'âcre amour m'a gonflé de torpeurs enivrantes.

O que ma quille éclate! O que j'aille à la mer!”

― Arthur Rimbaud, Le Bateau Ivre