There are several wonderful passages in W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz, but I particularly liked this one:
In the week I went daily to the Bibliotheque Nationale in the rue Richelieu, and usually remained in my place there until evening, in silent solidarity with the many others immersed in their intellectual labours, losing myself in the small print of the footnotes to the works I was reading, in the books I found mentioned in those notes, then in the footnotes to those books in their own turn, and so escaping from factual, scholarly accounts to the strangest of details, in a kind of continual regression expressed in the form of my own marginal remarks and glosses, which increasingly diverged into the most varied and impenetrable of ramifications.
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That reminds me of this one from Castoriadis:
“To think is not to get out of the cave; it is not to replace the uncertainty of shadows by the clear-cut
outlines of things themselves, the flame’s flickering glow by the light of the true sun. To think is to
enter the Labyrinth; more exactly, it is to make be and appear a Labyrinth when we might have stayed “lying among the flowers, facing the sky.” It is to lose oneself amidst galleries which exist only because we never tire of digging them; to turn round and round at the end of a cul-de-sac whose entrance has been shut off behind us—until, inexplicably, this spinning round opens up in the surrounding walls cracks which offer passage.” (Preface to Crossroads in the Labyrinth)