Take the so-called standard of living. What do most people mean by “living”? They don’t mean living. They mean the latest and closest plural approximation to singular prenatal passivity which science, in its finite but unbounded wisdom, has succeeded in selling their wives. – e.e. cummings, Introduction, Poems, 1954

If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awake — Aye, what then? – Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Nothing is not only nothing. It is also our prison. – Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin