Indrid Cold

“I have come to realise it doesn’t make much sense to ponder the meaning of life; that it is a question induced by melancholy; that an answer is not really what we are looking for. Does it not disappear the minute we find joy again? Who, when finally seized by a great desire to love, to dance, to work, still wonders: what is the meaning of life?”
― Belinda Cannone, Petit éloge de l'embrassement

“But my glances are still gentle, quieter than the tread of nuns at the holy sepulchre. And still more gentle is the breath of my lips. Like the spirit’s kiss on the Host in the minster, the kiss that transforms the bread into the body of our Lord. It should not wake, this beautiful sin, it should rest and have peace.”
― Hanns Heinz Ewers, The Dedalus Book of German Decadence: Voices of the Abyss

“My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while. […]. I'm two, and both keep their distance — Siamese twins that aren't attached.”
― Fernando Pessoa , The Book of Disquiet

“He has no friends that I know of, and his few neighbours consider him a bit of a weirdo, but I like to think of him as my friend as he will sometimes leave buckets of compost outside my house, as a gift for my garden. The oldest tree on my property is a lemon, a sprawling mass of twigs with a heavy bow. The night gardener once asked me if I knew how citrus trees died: when they reach old age, if they are not cut down and they manage to survive drought, disease and innumerable attacks of pests, fungi and plagues, they succumb from overabundance. When they come to the end of their life cycle, they put out a final, massive crop of lemons. In their last spring their flowers bud and blossom in enormous bunches and fill the air with a smell so sweet that it stings your nostrils from two blocks away; then their fruits ripen all at once, whole limbs break off due to their excessive weight, and after a few weeks the ground is covered with rotting lemons. It is a strange sight, he said, to see such exuberance before death. One can picture it in animal species, those million salmon mating and spawning before dropping dead, or the billions of herrings that turn the seawater white with their sperm and eggs and cover the coasts of the northeast Pacific for hundreds of miles. But trees are very different organisms, and such displays of overripening feel out of character for a plant and more akin to our own species, with its uncontrolled, devastating growth. I asked him how long my own citrus had to live. He told me that there was no way to know, at least not without cutting it down and looking inside its trunk. But, really, who would want to do that?”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World