Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then — the glory — so that a cricket song sweetens the ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. East Of Eden
“[…] she was feeling something new here. Or something old that she had long buried. [It] reminded her that she was, first and foremost, a human living on a planet. Almost everything she had done in her life […] – almost everything she had bought and worked for and consumed – had taken her further away from understanding that she and all humans were really just one of nine million species.” Midnight Library
To escape boredom, man works either beyond what his usual needs require, or else he invents play, that is, work that is designed to quiet no need other than that for working in general. Human, All Too Human
I suddenly found myself disentangled from the demonic snares, I saw the world before me bright and joyous once more, I was no longer subject to anxiety attacks and heart palpitations that choked me. The spell was broken, I was no longer a lost soul in torment, I was once again a schoolboy as always. Demian
Quotes