The document summarizes passages from four literary works: The Blind Owl by Hedayat, Metamorphosis by Kafka, Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Garcia-Marquez, and "Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" also by Garcia-Marquez. It presents three short quotes from each work summarizing themes of isolation, connection to nature, the inevitability of fate, and the transformative effects of beauty.

1. +
The Importance of
Human Connection
Cory Diehl, Sarah Farbacher,
Ross Lampl, MaddieLylo

2. +
The Blind Owl
 “If it is true that everyone has his own star in the sky mine must be
remote, dark and meaningless. Perhaps I have never had a star at all”
(Hedayat 107).
 “My being was somehow connected with that of all the creatures that existed
about me, with all the shadows that quivered around me. I was in
intimate, inviolable communion with the outside world and with all created
things, and a complex system of invisible conductors transmitted a restless flow
of impulses between me and all the elements of nature. There was no
conception, no notion which I felt to be foreign to me. I was capable of
penetrating with ease the secrets of the painters of the past, the mysteries of
abstruse philosophies, the ancient folly of ideas and species. At that moment I
participated in the revolutions of the earth and heaven, in the germination of
plants and in the instinctive movements of animals. Past and future, far and
dnear had joined together and fused in the life of my mind” (Hedayat 39).
 “I felt the need of those eyes. One glance from her would have been sufficient
to make plain all the problems of philosophy and the riddles of theology”
(Hedayat 31).

3. +
Metamorphosis
 “. . . And he already believed that the final alleviation of all his
grief was imminent” (Kafka).
 “[T]here was a mildness in the fresh air. It was, after
all, already the end of March” (Kafka).
 “The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming
pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial
everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later
rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now
doubly illuminated surface of things” (Kafka).

4. +
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
 For years we couldn’t talk about anything else. Our daily
conduct, dominated then by so many linear habits, had suddenly
begun to spin around a single common anxiety. The cocks of
dawn would catch us trying to give order to the chain of many
chance events that had made absurdity possible, and it was
obvious that we weren’t doing it from an urge to clear up mysteries
but because none of us could go on living without an exact
knowledge of the place and the mission assigned to us by fate”
(Garcia-Marquez 96).
 "No one had even wondered whether SanitagoNasar had been
warned, because it had seemed impossible to all that he hadn’t"
(Garcia-Marquez 20).
 "They didn't hear the shouts of the whole town, frightened by its
own crime" (Garcia-Marquez 118).

5. + “Handsomest Drowned Man in the World”
 “They secretly compared him to their own men, thinking that for
all their lives theirs were incapable of doing what he could do in
one night, and they ended up dismissing them deep in their
hearts as the weakest, meanest, and most useless creature on
earth” (Garcia-Marquez 316).
 “One of the women [. . .] then removed the handkerchief from
the dead man’s face and the men were left breathless, too”
(Garcia-Marquez 317).
 “They did not need to look at one another to realize that they
were no longer all present, nor would they ever be. But they
also knew that everything would be different from then on”
(Garcia-Marquez 318-319).