If I think back, it’s fairly strange, but somehow, 
it also makes me think as though it’s nothing out of the ordinary too.
Either way, it was a life changing event for me,
although it still feels like not even a single thing has changed.
It was very very odd to say the least, but it’s nothing uncommon.
It happened to me here, in Ikebukuro.

Ryuugamine Mikado ~ Durarara!!

Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate.
It is not a hobby.
Those who do it must do it.
Those who do not do it, think of it as a cousin of stamp collecting, a sister of the trophy cabinet, bastard of a sound bank account and a weak mind.

Jeanette Winterson

Gaston was not only a fierce lover, with his endless wisdom and imagination, but he was also, perhaps, the first man in the history of the species who had made an emergency landing and had come close to killing himself and his sweetheart simply to make love in a field of violets.

One Hundred Years Of Solitude ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

She looked like a newborn old woman.

One Hundred Years Of Solitude ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Aureliano Segundo though without saying so that the evil was not in the world but in some hidden place in the mysterious heart of Petra Cotes, where something had happened during the deluge that had turned the animals sterile and made money scarce. Intrigued by that enigma, he dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her.

One Hundred Years Of Solitude ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

He could not understand why he needed so many words to explain what he felt in war because one was enough: fear.

One Hundred Years Of Solitude ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"We'll tell them that we found him floating in the basket," she said, smiling.

"No one will believe it," the nun said.

"If they believe it in the Bible," Fernanda replied, "I don't see why they shouldn't believe it from me."

One Hundred Years Of Solitude ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"What does he say?" he asked.

"He's very sad," Ursula answered, "because he thinks that you're going to die."

"Tell him," the colonel said, smiling, "that a person doesn't die when he should but when he can."

One Hundred Years Of Solitude ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"Don't worry," he would say, smiling. "Dying is much more difficult than one imagines." In his case it was true. The certainty that his day was assigned gave him a mysterious immunity, an immortality for a fixed period that made him invulnerable to the risks of war and in the end permitted him to win a defeat that was much more difficult, much more bloody and costly than victory.

One Hundred Years Of Solitude ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"How strange men are,: she said, because she could not think of anything else to say. "They spend their lives fighting against priests and then give prayer books as gifts.

One Hundred Years Of Solitude ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez"

"Remember, old friend," he told him. "I'm not shooting you. It's the revolution that's shooting you."

One Hundred Years Of Solitude ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

You have taken this horrible game very seriously and you have done well because you are doing your duty," she told the members of the court. "But don't forget that as long as God gives us life we will still be mothers and no matter how revolutionary you may be, we have the right to pull down your pants and give you a whipping at the first sign of disrespect.

One Hundred Years Of Solitude ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"I'm not going to marry anyone," she told him, "much less you. You love Aureliano so much that you want to marry me because you can't marry him."

One Hundred Years Of Solitude ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"We will not leave," she said. "We will stay here, because we have had a son here."

"We have still not had a death," he said. "A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground."

Ursula replied with a soft firmness:
"If I have to die for teh rest of you to stay here, I will die."

One Hundred Years Of Solitude ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

There is no safe investment.
To love at all is to be vulnerable.
Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken.
If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one,
not even to an animal.
Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.
But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change.
It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation.
The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

The Four Leaves ~ C.S. Lewis