" this first hour of arrival before one was again pierced by knives and arrows—this strange animal feeling, this breath reaching far and coming from afar, this breeze, without emotion yet, along the streets of the heart, past the dull fires of facts, past the nail-studded cross of bygone days and past the barbed hooks of the future, this caesura, the silence within oscillation, the moment of pause, most open and most secret form of being, the unemphatic beat of eternity in the very transitoriness of the world "

― Erich Maria Remarque , Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country