"We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered."
- Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead ... See MoreSee Less

"A cage went in search of a bird."
- Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms ... See MoreSee Less

"In my sleep I was looking out from the fourth-floor bedroom at nearby buildings bathed in rain, gleaming with neon and streetlamp colours."
- Yūko Tsushima, Territory of Light ... See MoreSee Less

"I was walking alone in the peaceful city. I was alone, but I was marching like a descending regiment."
- Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea ... See MoreSee Less

"We are our memory, we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors."
- Jorge Luis Borges, In Praise of Darkness ... See MoreSee Less

Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard."
- Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching ... See MoreSee Less

"Clock! sinister god, terrifying, impassive
Whose finger threatens us and says: 'Remember!'"
- Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil ... See MoreSee Less

"I thought that the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow."
- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar ... See MoreSee Less

"There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night."
- Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus ... See MoreSee Less

"The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself."
- Bertrand Russell, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth ... See MoreSee Less

"The very houses seemed disposed to sleep, and it was a holiday for the streets, which were swept of their customary passengers, and left to their own quiet and shadows."
- Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge ... See MoreSee Less

"What are the convulsions of a city in comparison with the insurrections of the soul?"
- Victor Hugo, Les Misérables ... See MoreSee Less

"From this height the sleeping city seems like a child's construction, a model which has refused to be constrained by imagination."
- Ian Rankin, Dead Souls ... See MoreSee Less

"But if a city hasn't been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively."
- Alasdair Gray, Lanark ... See MoreSee Less

"The wet air was as cold as the ashes of love."
- Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely ... See MoreSee Less