first page of Grimus

Go, go, go, said the bird; human kind
Cannot bear very much reality

(T.S. Eliot)

Come, you lost atoms, to your Centre Draw,
And be the Eternal Mirror that you saw;
Rays that have wandered into darkness wide,
Return, and back into your sun subside.

(FARID-U-Din' ATTAR,
The Conference of Birds, trans. Fitzgerald)

Crow straggled, limply bedraggled his remnant.
He was his own leftover, the spat-out Scrag
He was what his brain could make nothing of.

(TED HUGHES,
Crow's Playmates)

The sands of Time are steeped in new Beginnings.

(IGNATIUS Q. GRIBB,
The All-Purpose Quotable Philosophy)

- First page of Grimus by Salman Rushdie.

victim, James Baldwin

"The victim who is able to articulate the situation of a victim has ceased to be a victim, he or she has become a threat!"

- James Baldwin (August 2, 1924–November 30, 1987).  He was an American novelist, writer, playwright, poet, essayist, and civil rights activist.

O, the conflicting selves jostling and joggling

"O, the conflicting selves jostling and joggling within these bags of skin. No wonder we are unable to remain focused on anything for very long; no wonder we invent remote-control channel-hopping devices. If we turned these instruments upon ourselves we'd discover more channels than a cable or satellite mogul ever dreamed of [...]"

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

Minnami, Gut mag alkan, Pern dirstan

"Minnami, Gut mag alkan, Pern dirstan"

"My darling, God makes hungry, the Devil thirsty."
- Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

Salman Rushdie quotes it in The Satanic Verses.

a letter from Henry James Sr. to his two sons

"Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential dearth in which its subject's roots are plunged. The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters."

Salman Rushdie quoting Henry James Sr. in his book The Satanic Verses, Chapter VII The Angel Azraeel.
According to Paul Brains's notes for The Satanic Verses:
The passage here quoted comes in fact from Henry James, Sr.’s book, Substance and Shadow (1866), p. 75. It is quoted in William James’ introduction to his father’s writings, collected in the volume entitled The Literary Remains of the Late Henry James (1884) but is not presented by him as a letter. The passage
is most readily available in Matthiessen (156). David Windsor points out that Rushdie evidently encountered the passage as the epigraph to José Donoso’s novel, The Obscene Bird of Night where the quotation is (mis-) attributed thus: “Henry James Sr., writing to his sons Henry and William.”