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1 " What are you burning?" On a glance, just some papers." I write in a journal." He spoke below his breath, so that his words weren't quite for me. " Because I like to see everything written down. So that I know it really happened. That I wasn't just making it up. Then I read it and memorize it. And then I have to destroy the hard evidence." I thought of my own journal, the muddle of every page. All those unfiltered, lunatic letters to Sean Ryan." What is it, exactly, that you need to destroy?" " Everything that I don't want to be true. "
2 " Was it possible to find recompense, meaning, connection with others amidst the mess and the muddle ? "
― Elizabeth Buchan , Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman (The Two Mrs Lloyd, #1)
3 " He never looks you straight in the eye; or if he does, it is somehow vaguely, indefinitely; he does not pierce you with the hawk's eye or the falcon's gaze of a cavalry officer. The reason for that is that he sees, at one and the same time, both your features and those of some plaster Hercules standing in his room, or else he imagines a painting of his own that he still means to produce. That is why his responses are often incoherent, not to the point, and the muddle of things in his head increases his timidity all the more. "
― Nikolai Gogol , The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol
4 " Tolerate the ... process of coming to knowledge or certainty or clarity through sometimes apparently hopeless thickets of confusion or bewilderment. Learn not to be surprised or disheartened by the muddle you inhabit and not to press too soon for a superficial reprieve. "
