Wallace Stevens:

The honey of heaven may or may not come,
But that of earth both comes and goes at once.
---------------
The walker in the moonlight walked alone,
And in his heart his disbelief lay cold.
---------------
And apt in versatile motion, touch and sound
To make the body covetous in desire
Of the still finer, more implacable chords.
---------------
The pillars are prostate, the arches are hag-
gard
The hotel is boarded and bare.
Yet the panorama of despair
Cannot be the speciality
Of this ecstatic air.
---------------
A little different from reality:
The difference that we make in what we see.
----------------
Under the white clouds piled and piled
Like gathered-up forgetfulness,
In sleeping air.
----------------
...not balances that we achieve but balances that happen
As a man and woman meet and love forthwith.

Other things:

Oserons-nous donc dire que cet avantage de la raison, de quoi nous faisons tant de fete, et pour le respect duquel nous nous tenons maitres et empereurs du rest des creatures, ait ete mis en nous pour notre tourment?
--Montaigne (48)

Men are children. They must be pardoned for everything, except malice.
--Joseph Joubert

Italo Svevo, Confessions of Zeno

When you are actually thinking of dying you have other things to do then than think about death. His whole being was concentrated on the effort to get his breath. (51)

Those who have not experienced it are inclined to think marriage more important than it really is. The mate you choose renews, for better or worse, her own race in your children, but Mother Nature, who ordains it thus, and yet cannot lead us straight to the goal (because when we get married it is not of our children we are thinking), persuades us that our wife will bring about our renewel--a curious illusion the facts in no way support. (57)

I had a considerable degree of culture owing to my having studied at the university; and still more owing to my long, and I think very instructive period of doing nothing. (58)

...he had the habit of shouting in order to think more clearly. (63)

In my dreams I made her more beautiful too, pysically. I have run after a good many women in the course of my life and succeeded in winning a fair number of them. In my dreams I possessed them all. I do not of course make them more beautiful by actually altering their features, but I do as an artist friend of mine, a very subtle painter, who when he is painting the portrait of a beautiful woman calls up vividly to his mind some other exquisite object, like fine porcelain for instance. It is a dangerous proceeding, for it is not only confined to dreams, and the lady continues in real life to keep something of the fruit, the flower, or the porcelain with which you adorned her. (76)

I approached her not in order to win her, but with the direct intention of marrying her, which is an unusual way for love to take; a wide and comfortable way perhaps, but it does not lead to the goal, though very near it. Love approached in this way lacks its chief characteristic: the subjection of the female. (77)

I think we all have delicate spots in our conscience as we do in our bodies, which we keep covered and prefer not to think about. (80)

Somehow, it’s easy to forget that life is a gloomy trial for a lot of people; on a related theme, it’s hard to conceive a more lugubrious subject than suicide—the extra-medical option the doldrums tends to suggest now and then (or often)--but this author, with a nice sense of calm and humor, and without getting the least bit sleezily therapeutic (here's to you, Dr. Phil), makes a considered case for sticking it out. (Note: I’m not myself tempted to join the suicide-club, even though it would help me get out of tomorrow’s exams.)

http://harpers.org/blog/2013/06/on-suicide/

Also, this poem by WS (not that one, the other) which I don't find in my hardback edition of his collected stuff:

No soldiers in the scenery,
No thoughts of people now dead,
As they were fifty years ago,
Young and living in a live air,
Young and walking in the sunshine,
Bending in blue dresses to touch something,
Today the mind is not part of the weather.

Today the air is clear of everything.
It has no knowledge except of nothingness
And it flows over us without meanings,
As if none of us had ever been here before
And are not now: in this shallow spectacle,
This invisible activity, this sense.

 --“A Clear Day and No Memories,” Wallace Stevens

A first sampling of Barbara Pym, from her novel Excellent Women:

I had observed that men usually did not do things unless they liked doing them. (9) 

But it was a women’s program and they all seemed so married and splendid, their lives so full and yet so well organized, that I felt more than usually spinsterish and useless.  (28)

Virtue is an excellent thing and we should all strive after it, but it can sometimes be a little depressing.  (44) 

Perhaps long spaghetti is the kind of thing that ought to be eaten quite alone with no one to watch one’s struggles. Surely many a romance must have been nipped in the bud by sitting opposite someone eating spaghetti? (96)

I told myself that, after all, life is like that for most of us—the small unpleasantnesses rather than the great tragedies; the little useless longings rather than the great renunciations and dramatic love affairs of history or fiction. (101) 

I always used to think that there’s only one flaw with Pride and Prejudice, and that is the absence of a 30-page sex scene between Elizabeth and Darcy.

- Martin Amis

Dame Ethel devotes the second half of her book to her adventures in Egypt, including the laying-out of a nine-hole golf course in the Nubian desert and her investigation into the nature of a hermaphrodite. But she does not say whether the hermaphrodite played golf, or what was its handicap!

-Agate, Ego (82)

Romanticism: In Romanticism thought and feeling are fused; its bent is toward exploration and discovery at whatever risk of error or failure; the religious emotion is innate and demands expression. Spirit is a reality but where it is placed varies and is secondary: the divine may be reached through nature or art. The individual self is a source of knowledge on which one must act; for one is embarked—engagé, as the 20C existentialists say. To act, enthusiasm must overcome indifference or despair; impulse must be guided by imagination and reason. The search is for truths, which reside in particulars, not in generalities; the world is bigger and more complex than any  set of abstractions, and it includes the past, which is never fully done with. Meditating on past and present leads to the estimate of man as great and wretched. But heroes are real and indispensible. They rise out the people, whose own mind-and-heart provides the makings of high culture. The errors of heroes and peoples are the price of knowledge, religion, and art, life itself being a heroic tragedy.

–Barzun, Dawn to Decadence (491)

Theology: Ces auteurs, me repartit-il, n'ont point cherche dans l'Ecriture ce qu'il faut croire, mais ce qu'ils croient eux-mêmes; ils ne l'ont point regardée comme un livre ou étaient contenus les dogmes qu'ils devaient recevoir mais comme un ouvrage qui pourrait donner de l'autorité a leurs propres idées.

-Montesquieu, Lettres Persanes (299)

'Mais c'est quoi, la dialetique?' 'C'est l'art et la manier de toujours retomber sur ses patte, mon vieux!'

-Jorge Semprun, Quel Beau Dimanche