Mourning is not as singular a state of emotional preoccupation as is commonly thought: it is, more precisely, an incessant discourse with the departe… - Lou Andreas-Salomé

Objectivity is mankind's glorious goal, summoning narcissism, Eros masked, from the dreams of childhood to the service of research, progress, art, and culture. When it stays behind in childish dreaming, and when its leap falls short, it slips without a blow into the bottomless deeps of disease.

Why did he have such a rough picture of her? It was strange that he found it so difficult to comprehend women in the manifold ways of their humanity and not just schematic way, as representations of their gender. Whether he idealized them, or regarded them as diabolic, a man always interpreted women's behavior too simply and personally, based on some chance reaction to himself. Maybe the notion that woman was sphinx-like stemmed from the sole fact that her full humanity, in no way inferior to man's, could not be grasped with such artificial simplifications. p. 25

"Oh, the mountains!" she said in her soft voice, and the indeterminate color of her eyes seemed to grow darker. "I used to love the plains, that's where I'm from. And it is beautiful there, too, where it is boundless, or at least appears to be so. But when people come to the plains, they immediately become human themselves, serving people, and they're no longer untouched and unapproachable. It occurs to me now that's why the mountains have the effect they do. As if one were seeing nature itself as it rises above all that's human and looks down upon it. No matter how many small settlements might grow among them, they still retain something so primeval." -- Anjuta ("Incognito"), p. 135