Hagia Sophia / Matthias Enard's "Compass"

"I was corresponding regularly with Sarah, postcards of the Hagia Sophia, seen from the Golden Horn. As Grillparzer said in his travel journal, 'There may be nothing like it in the whole world.' He describes, enthralled, the succession of monuments, palaces, villages, the power of this site that struck me fully too and filled me with energy, so open is this city, a wound in the sea, a gash engulfed by beauty; to stroll through Istanbul was, whatever the goal of one's expedition, a wrenching of beauty on the frontier--whether you regard Constantinople as the easternmost city in Europe or the westernmost city in Asia, as an end or a beginning, as a bridge or a border, this mixed nature is fractured by nature, and the place weighs on history as history itself weighs on humans."

- From “Compass” - Mathias Enard

From "Sons and Lovers" - D.H. Lawrence

“The Easter holidays began happily. Paul was his own frank self. Yet Miriam felt it would go wrong. On the Sunday afternoon she stood at her bedroom window, looking across at the oak-trees of the wood, in whose branches a twilight was tangled, below the bright sky of the afternoon. Grey-green rosettes of honeysuckle leaves hung before the window, some already, she fancied, showing bud. It was spring, which she loved and dreaded.”

Hunter Thompson, from "Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl"

“There is some kind of back-door connection in my head between Super Bowls and the Allman Brothers—a strange kind of theme-sound that haunts these goddamn stories no matter where I’m finally forced into a corner to write them. The Allman sound, and rain. There was heavy rain, last year, on the balcony of my dim-lit hotel room just down from the Sunset Strip in Hollywood…And more rain through the windows of the San Francisco office building where I finally typed out “the story.”

And now, almost exactly a year later, my main memory of Super Bowl VIII in Houston is rain and grey mist outside another hotel window, with the same strung-out sound of the Allman Brothers booming out of the same portable speakers that I had, last year, in Los Angeles.”