Ganz verschleiert ist hier das Wesen des Subjekts.

[Wittgenstein: Notebooks; 2.8.16]


In our case, if we had now grown serious, it was because each of us was living under the sign of his own fate — not in the shadow of a guardian angel, nor hidden in the folds of his robe, but as if at the feet of his own double which was detaching itself from him little by little to take on a bodily and material form. They were strange projections of ourselves, these new beings, and they absorbed us to the point where we lived them as in a new skin, to the point of complete identity, and our final preparations were not unlike the process of putting finishing touches to these frightful, pride-ridden automata known in magical lore as Teraphim. Like them, we were going to destroy a city ...

[Blaise Cendrars: Moravagine.]


Deus est sphaera, cujus centrum ubique, circumferentia nullibi.

[attributed to many — Nicholas of Cusa?]



...a barbaric and unknown race, employed by God knows whom, are even now blasting the Antarctic ice with dynamite, preparing to enter a subterranean network of natural tunnels, a network whose existence is known only to the inhabitants of Vheissu…

[Thomas Pynchon: V.]


Then thus replied the prophetess divine:
“Oh goddess-born of great Anchises' line,
The gates of hell are open night and day;
Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:
But to return, and view the cheerful skies,
In this the task and mighty labor lies.... .”

[Virgil: The Aeniad. Dryden translation.]


She stood there for a minute and she lighted the whole street up, like a torch. I was surprised there weren’t reflections on the dim walls around us.

[Cornell Woolrich: The Black Path Of Fear.]