from Epicurus

"Against other things it is possible to obtain security, but when it comes to death we human beings all live in an unwalled city"

from Madame Bovary

"As for Emma, she never once questioned herself to see if she loved him. Love, she believed, had to come, suddenly, with a great clap of thunder and a lightning flash, a tempest from heaven that falls upon your life, like a devastation, scatters your ideals like leaves and hurls your very soul into the abyss. Little did she know that up on the roof of the house, the rain will form a pool if the gutters are blocked, and there she would have stayed feeling safe inside, until one day she suddenly discovered the crack right down the wall."

-- from Madame Bovary, Flaubert (trans. Wall)

The living dead

From Jonathan Gold's interview in the Believer:

JG: There is an octopus intelligence. I don’t know what it is, and nobody really knows what it is, but it definitely exists. Their nervous system is totally different. You’ve had sannakji? The tentacles will climb up the chopsticks. The suckers will adhere to your mouth. You figure that it’s like chickens with their heads cut off, but then you read about the decentralized nervous system, how they may have “killed it” by ramming a knife through its brain, but that it doesn’t have a brain like we do. Suddenly, what was a fun, gimmicky thing becomes horrifying.