From an introduction by Marguerite Yourcenar to The Writing of Stones, Roger Caillois

....In short, there had taken place in that great intellect the equivalent of the Copernican revolution: man was no longer the center of the universe, except in the sense that the center is everywhere; man, like all the rest, was a cog in the whole system of turning wheels. Quite early on, having entered "the forbidden laboratories," Caillois applied himself to the study of the diagonals which link the species, of the recurrent phenomena that act, so to speak, as a matrix of forms. His work on the octopus and the praying mantis showed him the relation between a creature belonging to the lowest reaches of the animal abyss and the fantasies and desires inhabiting the deeps of humanity. In Meduse et Cie (Medusa and Company) he meditated on the insect imagination with its extravagant and terrifying transformations, its masks for display or for battle, its nuptial ornaments or instruments of hypnotism, not all of them utilitarian but seemingly corresponding to an almost conscious need for change and elaboration. 

One of the working hypotheses of modern science - that nature always acts with the greatest possible economy of means and toward the most practical of ends - finally came to appear unacceptable to Caillois. "Nature is not a miser." He had become more aware of it as a mine of prodigality, a feast of superfluity; of the element of fantasy, the aesthetic factor whether unconscious or otherwise which is inherent in every scrap of matter and of which man's own aesthetic may be no more than one of many manifestations, and one often distorted by our exaggerated awareness of it ....

Educated, Tara Westover

 On our first evening in Rome, we climbed one of the seven hills and looked out over the metropolis. Byzantine domes hovered over the city like rising balloons. It was nearly dusk; the streets were bathed in amber. It wasn't the colour of a modern city, of steel, glass and concrete. It was the colour of sunset. 

For two days we explored Rome, a city that is both a living organism and a fossil. Bleached structures from antiquity lay like dried bones, embedded in pulsating cables and thrumming traffic, the arteries of modern life. We visited the Pantheon, the Roman Forum, the Sistine Chapel. My instinct was to worship, to venerate. That is how I felt toward the whole city: that it should be behind glass, adored from a distance, never touched, never altered. My companions moved through the city differently, aware of its significance but not subdued by it. They were not hushed by the Trevi Fountain; they were not silenced by the Colosseum. 

The Waves, Virginia Woolf

 'Life is pleasant. Life is good. The mere process of life is satisfactory. Take the ordinary man in good health. He likes eating and sleeping. He likes the snuff of fresh air and walking at a brisk pace down the Strand. Or in the country there’s a cock crowing on a gate; there’s a foal galloping round a field. Something always has to be done next. Tuesday follows Monday; Wednesday Tuesday. Each spreads the same ripple of well-being, repeats the same curve of rhythm; covers fresh sand with a chill or ebbs a little slackly without. So the being grows rings; identity becomes robust. What was fiery and furtive like a fling of grain cast into the air and blown hither and thither by wild gusts of life from every quarter is now methodical and orderly and flung with a purpose – so it seems.’

An encounter with the sea (Ocean Sea, Alessandro Barrico)

 "we could think of a woman—of a woman—respected, loved, mother, woman. For whatever reason—illness—brought to a sea that she would otherwise never have seen and that is now the wavering needle of her cure, an immeasurable index, in truth, which she contemplates but does not understand. Her hair hangs loose and she is barefoot, and this is not a mere detail, it is absurd, along with that little white tunic and the trousers that leave her ankles exposed, you could imagine her slim hips, it is absurd, only her boudoir has seen her like this, and yet, like that, there she is on an enormous beach, where there is none of the viscous, stagnant air of the bridal bed, but the gusty sea breeze bearing the edict of a wild freedom removed, forgotten, oppressed, debased for a whole lifetime as mother, wife, beloved woman. And it is clear: she cannot not feel it. That emptiness all around, with no walls or closed doors, and in front of her, alone, a boundless exciting mirror of water, that alone would already have been a feast for the senses, an orgy of the nerves, and everything is yet to happen, the bite of the gelid water, the fear, the liquid embrace of the sea, the shock on the skin, the heart in the mouth . . ."