Quotes

people too big for tidy-tiny repetitive existence. Manny Farber on Fassbinder's characters

What a blank space I seemed, that everybody overlooked, yet, I was in the way. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

Illiterates have to dictate. Stanislaw Jerzy Lec, 1964

Rennet of memory on a swooned body, its perfectly white belly cast in shadow. Jean Louis Schefer, The Deluge, The Plague

all they live by has been handled by others Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard

al mirall mogut 'a mirror that moves' in Catalan

IN RIVERS north of the future
I cast the net that you
haltingly weight
with stonewrit
shadows. Paul Celan, Oct. 1963

My creatures are born of a long denial. Pablo Neruda

I can tell them to go, and they go; but sometimes they come, when I don't tell them to come. ?

I can't. I'm too nervous to eat pie. Ray Carver notebook entry

There was the silent river and the silent man, a man of even classic face. And there was the last nightmare touch that his smile suddenly went wrong. G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

they mistrusted openings, gateways, roads by which unhappiness might arrive. said of the people of Venasque

"Do you suppose there is something to be done?" I asked her, "Huddle and cling," said Mrs. Davis. "We can huddle and cling. It will pall, of course, everything palls, in time..." Donald Barthelme, At the End of the Mechanical Age

Where there is veneration,
Even a dog's tooth emits light. Tibetan Proverb

It made one think of the prisons of the spirit men create for themselves and for others - so overpowering,
So much a part of the way things appear to have to be and then abruptly, with a little shift, so insubstantial. V.S. Naipaul

There can be a poverty as well as a wealth in explicitness. George Steiner, On Difficulty

Spending plenty of time on something can be the most sophisticated form of revenge. Haruki Murakami, the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Pressure of memory upon a fainting body, its stomach shaded yet perfectly white. Jean Louis Schefer

When I'm in the water anything is possible: it is gravity that lets me down. CC

The world strikes me as a hurdy-gurdy overpressurized with trite rechurning. Max Beckmann

...that duffed hybrid in the rough. the description of Padraig Harrington's errant fairway drive during the 2006 USGA Golf Open by U.S. network commentator 'Dotty'

Drink a cicada soup, and you'll be singing all right. Catanian idiom

The only things that appear are those which are first able to dissimulate themselves. Things already grasped in their aspect or peacefully resembling themselves never appear. They are apparent, of course, but only apparent: they will never be given to us as appearing. Georges Didi-Huberman

It wasn't my kind of shallow. Jello Biafra

Gathering the children from (or for?) the cache. a message that flashed up briefly on Laylah A's laptop screen - 'Is it the Russians?'

I live only here, between your eyes and you,
But I live in your world. What do I do?
- Collect no interest - otherwise what I can;
Above all I am not that staring man. Elizabeth Bishop, TO BE WRITTEN ON THE MIRROR IN WHITEWASH

It is sometimes necessary to remain faithful to an idea one has loved, even if one knows this idea to be dying. Harun Farocki

God created everything from nothing, but the nothingness shows through. Paul Valery

One must do as the animals do, who erase every footprint in front of their lair. Montaigne

There commeth much evill in the eares, but more at the eyes. Anthony Munday

Nothing is missing, not even, and especially, nothingness, the true solidifier of the scene. Julio Cortazar

Damned misleading silhouette! Homer J. Simpson, after mistaking Barney for Marge in the (wrong) bedroom window.

Hell is the place of those who have denied;
They find there what they planted and what dug,
A Lake of Spaces, and a Wood of Nothing,
And wander there and drift, and never cease
Wailing for substance. W.B. Yeats, The Hour-Glass

All lightly shimmering in the heat, these lifeforms, like wonders much reduced. Rough likenesses thrown up at hearsay after the things themselves had faded in men's minds. Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

There's no better time to think big thoughts than under the guise of doing something.
Anonymous Wisconsonite ice-fisherman

Why this sudden affability after such desertion...? Samuel Beckett

Our nothings are barely different. J.L. Borges