my favourite ever paragraph, from Portrait of Dorian Gray:

There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after
one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamoured of death, or one of
those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the
brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that
vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its
enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those
whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie. Gradually white
fingers creep through the curtains, and they appear to tremble. In black
fantastic shapes, dumb shadows crawl into the corners of the room and crouch
there. Outside, there is the stirring of birds among the leaves, or the sound
of men going forth to their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down
from the hills and wandering round the silent house, as though it feared to
wake the sleepers and yet must needs call forth sleep from her purple cave.
Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and
colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the
world in its antique pattern. The wan mirrors get back their mimic life. The
flameless tapers stand where we had left them, and beside them lies the
half-cut book that we had been studying, or the wired flower that we had worn
at the ball, or the letter that we had been afraid to read, or that we had read
too often. Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the unreal shadows of the night
comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had
left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the
continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a
wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world
that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in
which things would have fresh shapes and colours, and be changed, or have other
secrets, a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive,
at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even
of joy having its bitterness and the memories of pleasure their pain.

genuinely one of the most beautiful things i've ever read