It came to me…that I didn't want to be anywhere else in the world at that moment, that what I was feeling at that moment justified all I had been thr… - John Fowles

In a vivid insight, a flash of black lightning, he saw that all life was parallel: that evolution was not vertical, ascending to a perfection, but horizontal. Time was a great fallacy; existence was without history, was always now, was always this being caught in the same fiendish machine. All those painted screens erected by man to shut out reality - history, religion, duty, social position, all were illusions, mere opium fantasies.
- The French Lieutenant's Woman

I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope - an impotence, in short; and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.

Death is not in the nature of things; it is the nature of things. But what dies is the form. The matter is immortal.