"A great chocolate-coloured pall lowered over heaven, but the wind was continually charging and routing these embattled vapours."
- Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

"He who climbs upon the highest mountains laughs at all tragedies, real or imaginary." - Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

"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

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

"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

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

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

"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

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

"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

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

"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

"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

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

"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

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

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

"It's true, though: time moves in its own special way in the middle of the night."
- Haruki Murakami, After Dark

"The Bastille not only overshadowed the capital, but it darkened the hearts of men, for it had been notorious for centuries as the instrument and the emblem of tyranny."
- Lord Acton, Lectures on the French Revolution

"Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold, oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve."
- Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf