Astragal

The road is as bare and harsh as a desert: later, perhaps, calmly, we'll start down magic pathways...From now until then there is still a great deal of pain, a great many people and things to annihilate: thread by thread I unravel, I destroy; I hate myself for making a "project" out of Julien, but I sense too many false and sticky attachments around him, these at least I would like to break off.

I used to be pampered, petted, fussed over, too, in the old days: I was intact and able to bite, my cupboard was full and my claws were ingenious.

My equipment was destroyed, I am wounded and begging, and it's I now who offers herself and clings; people don't hold onto me at all, for I have nothing to give them but myself, myself naked, and it will take a lot of time and tenderness before some resource, some source springs up in me.

Chapter 133: The Chase - First Day

Ye two are the opposite poles of one thing; Starbuck is Stubb reversed, and Stubb is Starbuck; and ye two are all mankind; and Ahab stands alone among the millions of the peopled earth, nor gods nor men his neighbors! Cold, cold- I shiver!

This Is Life

My heart wonders incessantly
If this is life, what is it that they call death?
Love was a dream?
Ask not about the fate of this dream?
Ask not about the punishment
I received for the crime of loyalty.

The Last of the Romans

On 8 October 1912, during the First Balkan War, Lemnos became part of Greece. The Greek navy under Rear Admiral Pavlos Kountouriotis took it over without any casualties from the occupying Turkish Ottoman garrison, who were returned to Anatolia. Peter Charanis, born on the island in 1908 and later a professor of Byzantine history at Rutgers University recounts when the island was occupied and Greek soldiers were sent to the villages and stationed themselves in the public squares. Some of the children ran to see what Greek soldiers looked like. ‘‘What are you looking at?’’ one of them asked. ‘‘At Hellenes,’’ the children replied. ‘‘Are you not Hellenes yourselves?’’ a soldier retorted. ‘‘No, we are Romans."

(source)

Little Gidding

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.