He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking. — Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Him that I love, I wish to be free – even from me. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face – there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes. Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself. The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart. — Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

The industriousness of the ancients is in our hands; they even make their past present in our times and we are struck dumb; their memory lives in us and we are without memorials of our own. What a miracle! The dead are alive and the living are buried by them. — Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium (12th century, ed. 1914 M.R. James, p. 203)