One has, I am now certain, to be a little mad to see into the past or the future, to be a little abridged of life to know life, the obscure life – da… - Djuna Barnes

THE MAN: We will bury her deep beneath our hearts, yours and mine — for her soul is a flower, and that we may not touch; but her spirit is wine, and that we may drink, that she may have her shroud.

RAGNA: All you do not take from the world the world takes from you, all the flowering plants you have denied yourself are full of you, your presence makes the wheat fields uneasy, because of you and likes of you the markets are querulous and mean and overfed. The joints of beef you have not eaten have eaten you. They are glutted with the mouths they have left empty.

Morbid? You make me laugh. This life I write and draw and portray is life as it is, and therefore you call it morbid. Look at my life. Look at the life around me. Where is this beauty that I am supposed to miss? The nice episodes that others depict? Is not everything morbid? I mean the life of people stripped of their masks. Where are the relieving features? Often I sit down to work at my drawing board, at my typewriter. All of a sudden my joy is gone. I feel tired of it all because, I think, "What's the use?" Today we are, tomorrow dead. We are born and don't know why. We live and suffer and strive, envious or envied. We love, we hate, we work, we admire, we despise. … Why? And we die, and no one will ever know that we have been born.