Quotes

it was said of them that, "they lived in a suburb arrived at only by secondary roads".the Rockefeller accused, Melbourne

...
each image
getting less and less attractive,
like the beginning of a slander
on the one that went before.John Forbes, Je ne regrette rien

It's not that fast horses are rare, but men who know enough to spot them are few and far between.Han Yu

He had failed to work up a fresh sense of indignation. As his chemistry master used to say, the solution was already saturated. Saturated with indignation.Leonardo Sciascia, Open Doors

If there's no bottom in your eyes they hold more.Hazel Motes in Flannery O'Conner's Wise Blood

Expression diminishes you, impoverishes you, lifts weights off you: expression is a loss of substance, and liberation. It drains you, hence it saves you, it strips you of an encumbering overflow.E. M. Cioran

Such is therefore a look lacking terror, a look that does not learn, but that follows.Jean Louis Schefer

How do you get to the point of a sabbath, that is legitimate and deserved? Wendell Berry

My dad and I share the same shadow. Kim Peek

There's no whining in baseball. Mother to son, Central Park NYC, May 2009

with a single note they muffle a thousand possibilities. Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

Pay no heed. They'd all have you circling if you paid them heed. John McGahern

Sometimes to refute a single sentence it is necessary to tell a life story. John Berger

He speaks like a flopped somersault and behaves like a big improbability pummeled into human shape. Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten (on his fellow-pupil Fuchs)

A page of printed prose should bring to it's mimesis something extra, a kind of supernatural as it were, to lend roundness - a fine excess that corresponds with the intricacy and opacity of the real world. John Updike (1932-2009)

Hoarding and squandering filched the bright world's glee away... Dante, L'Inferno vii. 58

I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me Catatonia or give me Charlie Chaplin. At the moment, a great many of us live in our 51st state, Catatonia... Since I choose to live outside that state, I wear the Fool's motley. It makes things easier... Fools of the world unite. You have nothing to lose. Studs Terkel (1912-2008)

... the blighting power of the 'eye' made nearly everyone artificial. Clarence John Laughlin

in the Parsee Ahab saw his forethrown shadows, in Ahab the Parsee his abandoned substance. Herman Melville, Moby Dick

people too big for tidy-tiny repetitive existence. Manny Farber (1917-2008) 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