On quotation

#259

2011-03-26T15:54:00.002Z

“Great is the anguish of the man who becomes aware of his isolation and seeks to escape from his own memory; he is obsessed and outcast, flung back into the deepest animal anguish, into the anguish of the creature that suffers violence and inflicts violence, flung back into an overwhelming loneliness in which his flight and his despair and his stupor may become so great that he cannot help thinking of inflicting violence on himself so as to escape the immutable law of events” (id, 647).

#258

2011-03-26T15:46:00.003Z

“Can this age be said to still have reality? Does it possess any real value in which the meaning of its existence is preserved? Is there a reality for the non-meaning of a non-existence? In what haven has reality found its refuge? in science, in law, in duty or in the uncertainty of an ever-questioning logic whose point of plausibility has vanished into the infinite?” (id, 559).

#257

2011-03-26T15:40:00.003Z

“He who is mentally lonely can always escape into romanticism, and from spiritual loneliness there is always a way of escape into the intimacy of sex – but for ultimate loneliness, for immediate loneliness, there is no longer any escape into symbols.

(...)

“Ah,” says the romantic, drawing on the cloak of an alien value-system, “ah, now I am one of you and am no longer lonely.” “Ah,” says the aesthete, drawing on the same cloak, “I am still lonely, but this is a lovely cloak.” The aesthete is the serpent in the romantic Garden of Eden.

Children are intimate at once with everything: the thing is both immediate and at the same time a symbol. Hence the radicality of children.

(...)

The lonelier a man becomes, the more detached he is from the value-system in which he lives, the more obviously are his actions determined by the irrational. But the romantic, clinging to the framework of an alien and dogmatic system, is – it seems incredible – completely rational and unchildlike” (id, 540-541).

#256

2011-03-26T15:26:00.003Z

“(...) in this fashion, in this absolute devotion to logical rigour, the Western world has won its achievments, – and with the same thoroughness, the absolute thoroughness that abrogates itself, must it eventually advance ad absurdum:

war is war, l'art pour l'art, in politics there's no room for compunction, business is business, – all these appertain to the same aggressive and radical spirit, informed by that uncanny, I might almost say that metaphysical, lack of consideration for consequences, that ruthless logic directed on the object and on the object alone, which looks neither to the right nor to the left; and this, all this, is the style of thinking that characterizes our age” (id, 446).

#255

2011-03-26T15:13:00.003Z

“The style of an epoch, it is certain, affects not merely the artist; it penetrates all contemporary activities, and crystallizes itself not only in works of art but in all the values which make up the culture of the age, and of which works of art constitute only an insignificant part” (id, 414).

#254

2011-03-07T20:28:00.004Z

love's function is to fabricate unknownness

(known being wisheless;but love,all of wishing)

though life's lived wrongsideout,sameness chokes oneness

truth is confused with fact,fish boat of fishing

and men are caught by worms(love may not care

if time totters,light droops,all measures bend

nor marvel if a thought should weigh a star

–dreads dying least;and less,that death should end)

how lucky lovers are(wose selves abide

under whatever shall discovered be)

whose ignorant each breathing dares to hide

more than most fabulous wisdom fears to see

(who laugh and cry)who dream,create and kill

while the whole moves;adn every part stands still:

(id, 74)

#253

2011-02-26T08:28:00.003Z

the boys i mean are not refined

they go with girls who buck and bite

they do not give a fuck for luck

they hump them thirteen times a night

one hangs out a hat upon her tit

one carves a cross in her behind

they do not give a shit for a wit

the boys i mean are not refined

they come with girls who bite and buck

who cannot read and cannot write

who laugh like they would fall apart

and masturbate with dynamite

the boys i mean are not refined

they cannot chat of that and this

they do not give a fart for art

they kill like you would take a piss

they speak whatever's on their mind

they do whatever's in their pants

the boys i mean are not refined

they shake the mountains when they dance

(id, 52)

#252

2011-02-26T08:17:00.006Z

“let's start a magazine

to hell with literature

we want something redblooded

lousy with pure

reeking with stark

and fearlessly obscene

but really clean

get what I mean

let's not spoil it

let's make it serious

something authentic and delirious

you know something genuine like a mark

in a toilet

graced with guts and gutted

with grace”

squeeze your nuts and open your face

(id, 30)

#251

2011-02-26T07:59:00.003Z

may i feel said he

(i'll squeal said she

just once said he)

it's fun said she

(may i touch said he

how much said she

a lot said he)

why not said she

(let's go said he

not too far said she

what's too far said he

where you are said she)

may i stay said he

(which way said she

like this said he

if you kiss said she

may i move said he

is it love said she)

if you're willing said he

(but you're killing said she

but it's life said he

but your wife said she

now said he)

ow said she

(tiptop said he

don't stop said she

oh no said he)

go slow said she

(cccome?said he

ummm said she)

you're divine!said he

(you are Mine said she)

(id, 21-22)

#250

2011-02-21T07:34:00.009Z

“If you work in a bookshop then systematic theft is the obvious way forward for the ambitious autodidact” (Harsent, 2011: 12).

WROE, Nicholas and David Harsent (2011). “A Life In Writing” in The Guardian Review. London: Guardian News & Media.

#249

2011-02-15T13:29:00.003Z

“I have called the Dichter the keeper of metamorphoses: but he is a keeper in a further sense as well. In a world of achievement and specialization, a world that sees nothing bu peaks, towards which one strives in a kind of linear focus that exerts all strength o the cold solicitude of the peaks which scorning and blurring the adjacent things, the many, the real things, which do not offer themselves for any help towards the peaks – in a world that prohibits metamorphosis more and more because it hinders the overall goal of production, which heedlessly multiplies the means of its self-destruction while simultaneously attempting to stifle whatever earlier human qualities are still extant – in such a world, which one might label the most blinded of all worlds, it seems of cardinal significance that there are people who, nonetheless, still keep practicing the gift of metamorphosis” (id, 161-162).

#248

2011-02-15T13:15:00.002Z

“I feel distrustful of both the man who merely writes and the man who self-complaisantly still labels himself as a Dicther (...) For in reality, no man today can be a writer, a Dichter, if he does not seriously doubt his right to be one” (id, 157).

#247

2011-02-15T13:07:00.002Z

“People are only defenseless only when they have no experience or no memory” (Canetti, 1986: 13).

CANETTI, Elias (1986). The Conscience Of Words. Translation by Joachim Neugroschel. London: André Deutsch Limited.

#246

2011-02-13T13:10:00.004Z

“Our common destiny is the sum of our single lives, and each of these single lives is developing quite normally, in accordance, as it were, with its private logicality. We feel totality to be insane, but for each single life we can easily discover logical guiding motives. Are we, then, insane because we have not gone mad?” (id, 374).

#245

2011-02-13T12:55:00.000Z

“Great is the fear of him who awakens. He returns with less certainty to his waking life, and he fears the puissance of his dream, which though it may not have borne fruit in action has yet grown into a new knowledge. An exile from dream, he wanders in dream” (id, 303).

#244

2011-02-13T12:43:00.007Z

“When desires and aims meet and merge, when dreams begin to foreshadow the great moments and crises of life, the road narrows then into darker gorges, and the prophetic dream of death enshrouds the man who has hitherto walked dreaming in sleep: all that has been, all aims, all desires, flit past him once more as they do before the eyes of a dying man, and one can well-nigh call it chance if that road does not end in death.

The man who from afar off yearns for his wife or merely for the home of his childhood has begun his sleepwalking” (id, 292).

#243

2011-02-13T10:51:00.002Z

“Men have no feelings, and too much brains is just as bad” (id, 213).

NO THANKS

2011-02-07T15:32:00.007Z

Farrar & Rinehart

Simon& Schuster

Coward-McCann

Limited Editions

Harcourt, Brace

Random House

Equinox Press

Smith & Haas

Viking Press

Knopf

Dutton

Harper's

Scribner's

Covici, Friede

(Cummings, 1998: 2)

CUMMINGS, E. E. (1998). No Thanks. Edited by Richard S. Kennedy. New York: Liveright.

#241

2011-01-28T18:38:00.003Z

“Tú fuiste como todas las mujeres, ni mejor ni peor” (id, 176).

#240

2011-01-28T18:35:00.002Z

“¡Mis noches ya no eran triunfantes , como aquellas noches tropicales perfumadas por la pasión de la Niña Chole! María Antonieta soltóse de mis brazos y entró en su tocador. Yo esperé algún tiempo, y después la segui: Al rmor de mis pasos, la miré huir toda blanca, y ocultarse entre los cortinajes de su lecho: Un lecho antiguo de lustroso nogal, tálamo clásico donde los viejos matrimonios navarros dormían hasta llegar a viejos, castos, sencillos, cristianos, ignorantes de aquella ciencia vopultuosa que divertía el ingenio maligno, y un poco teológico, de mi maestro el Aretino. María Antonieta fue exigente como una dogaresa, pero yo fui sabio como un viejo cardenal que hubiese aprendido las artes secretas del amor, en el confesionario y en una Corte del Rancimiento” (id, 117).

#239

2011-01-28T18:27:00.002Z

“¡Lloré como un Dios antiguo al extinguirse su culto!” (Valle-Inclán, 1975: 86).

VALLE-INCLÁN, Ramón Del (1975). Sonata De Otoño Y Sonata De Invierno. Madrid: Editorial Espasa-Calpe.

#238

2011-01-23T10:06:00.002Z

“Yo, que en el fondo de aquellos ojos creía ver siempre el enigma oscuro de su traición, no podía ignorar cuánto cuesta acercarse a los altares de Venus Turbulenta. Desde entonces compadezco a los desgraciados que, engañados por una mujer, se consumen sin volver a besarla. Para ellos será eternamente un misterio la exaltación gloriosa de la carne” (id, 162).

#237

2011-01-23T10:02:00.004Z

“Quise primeiro que la Niña Chole se destrenzase el cabello, y vestido el blanco hipil me hablase en su vieja lengua, como una princesa prisionera a un capitán conquistador. Ella obedició sonriendo. Yo la tenía en mis brazos, y las palabras más bellas y musicales las besaba, sin comprenderlas, sobre sus labios” (id, 141).

#236

2011-01-23T09:58:00.003Z

“Palpitante de miedo, se refugiaba en mis brazos. Mis manos, distraídas y paternales, comenzaron a desflorar sus senos. Ella, suspirando, entornó sus ojos, y celebramos nuestras bodas con siete copiosos sacrificios que ofrecimos a los dioses como el triunfo de la vida” (id, 120).

#235

2011-01-23T09:56:00.000Z

“Lo mejor de la santidad son las tentaciones.” (Valle-Inclán, 1963: 21).

VALLE-INCLÁN Ramón Del (1963). Sonata De Primavera Y Sonata De Estío. Madrid: Editorial Espasa-Calpe.

#234

2011-01-21T18:13:00.000Z

“The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn't look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought, and Rosewater read out loud again:

Oh boy – they sure did picked up the wrong guy to lynch that time!

And that thought had a brother: 'There are right people to lynch.' Who? People not well connected. So it goes.

The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really was a nobody and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had, He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels

So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground. There couldn't possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought. The reader would have to think that, too, since the new Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was

And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was a thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son, giving him the full powers and privilege of The Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this From this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections” (id, 75-76).

#233

2011-01-21T17:59:00.000Z

“They were trying to re-invent themselves and their universe. Science-fiction was a big help (...) He said that everything there was to know about life was in The Brothers Karamazov, by Feodor Dostoievsky. 'But that isn't enough anymore'” (id, 70-71).

#232

2011-01-21T17:54:00.002Z

“He became slightly unstuck in time, saw the alte movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded American, though, and some of the bombers were still in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new” (id, 54).

#231

2011-01-21T17:44:00.002Z

“GOD GRANT ME

THE SERENITY TO ACCEPT

THE THINGS I CANNOT CHANGE,

COURAGE

TO CHANGE THE THINGS I CAN,

AND WISDOM ALWAYS

TO TELL THE

DIFFERENCE”

(id, 46).

#230

2011-01-21T17:41:00.002Z

“When a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly fir people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future always have existed, always will exist” (Vonnegut, 1979: 25).

VONNEGUT, Kurt (1979). Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children's Crusade. A Duty-dance with Death. St. Albans: Triad/Panther Books.

#229

2011-01-21T14:24:00.002Z

“Dark meat, hams gigantic, chest of a smallish horse, plaited with muscle. Were men built like that, he thought: run fifty miles an hour, leap twelve-foot fences, probably still be consuming each other. Truly eating the Enemy's flesh. Difficult tow age modern war, too much flesh destroyed. Everything more personal. Man as he's built now is too puny for his own ego. Flesh the color of the feline. Sweetish, it must be. Sickening. Filthy animals, all of us. Deserve extinction. Except for the brain, thank god. Have to give credit when due. Too much the killer though. Incredibly oversexed. Copulate with anything that will stand still. Two three times a day. Fifty, sixty years of the two-backed beast” (id, 197-198).

#228

2011-01-21T14:18:00.000Z

“Stealing ins not only supposed to be to be unprofitable and selfish but unmanly and unpatriotic. Stealing something as little and helpless as a bull elk, anyway. Big stealing is something else, but it always happens to big men and they always get caught or ruined. The little man confesses, pleading a lapse of memory, bad health, confusion, on order to prove himself above the littleness of the thing he tried to take home in his lunchpail. The policeman is your friend and the laws are your laws and if in this land you can't tighten enough guts to find an opportunity, then you're not a man at all, you're a pissant. Or crazy. Worse. You can be different, but only if you're different like in everyone else in your area is different” (id, 112-113).

#227

2011-01-21T14:04:00.003Z

“There sat a coyote, calf-eater, lamb-stealer, fawn-killer and hamstringer – glaring across an old dead cow as if to say: Fuckyou buddy. With or without the words you talk and the gun you pack, I'm ten times the animal you are” (id, 93).

#226

2011-01-21T13:59:00.002Z

“The entire timber business was a harvest designed to keep the government busy, keep a few dozen or so rich men rich, provide hundreds of jobs for the hicks – and a few lieutenentcies (...) of course, it provided, too, for schools like the one in his small town where he had been taught in twelve compulsive years to read, write and believe. What a hick he had been. Fuck them” (id, 47-48).

#225

2011-01-21T13:54:00.000Z

“They would listen to America groping for answers, trembling with outrage, pity, compassion, confusion – old men with shaky voices indignant over how things had changed, young kids earnestly delivering the most common clichés as if they had invented them that very instant” (Shetzline, 1969: 21).

SHETZLINE, David (1969). Heckletooth 3. New York, Toronto: Random House.

#224

2010-10-24T09:57:00.002+01:00

“Any biography is chance, and, beginning at conception, chance – the tyranny of contingency – is everything” (Roth, 2010: 242-243).

ROTH, Philip (2010). Nemesis. London: Jonathan Cape.

#223

2010-10-22T15:58:00.004+01:00

“A fool in love like that will blow
The sun and moon and all the stars
To amuse his sweetheart an hour or so.” (id, 101)

#222

2010-10-22T15:56:00.000+01:00

“(...) While it bubbled away

I could build a thousand bridges, I daresay.

Not only art, not only science

Are needful for it, also patience.

Quiet spirits work for years, only long length

Of time will give a subtle fermentation strength.” (id, 82)

#221

2010-10-22T15:52:00.000+01:00

“Go on, despise science and reason,
Highest of all the powers that humans have,
And only let the lying spirit give
You strength in works of magic and illusion.
Then without question you are mine –
Fate's gift to him's a spirit always driving
On and on, allowed free reign,
And in its headlong striving
It overleaps the joys of earthly living.” (id, 62)

#220

2010-10-16T09:46:00.003+01:00

“The way you look at things, my friend

Is just the usual way they get looked at.

We need a cleverer way than that

Before life's pleasures end” (id, 61).

#219

2010-10-16T09:38:00.004+01:00

“Fire and blood we have and copious

Birds and beasts and gulphs and rocky tors.

Whithin the girdle of these walls confined

Pace out Creation's whole round

And with a measured haste propel

Yourselves from heaven through the world to hell” (Goethe, 2005: 10).

GOETHE, Johann von (2005). Faust, Part I. Translated by David Constantine. London: Penguin Books.

#218

2010-09-20T21:19:00.000+01:00

“Nevertheless after some eighteen months they had their first child. Ir actually happened. How this came about cannot be told here. Besides, after the material for character construction already provided, the reader can imagine it for himself” (id, 158).

#217

2010-09-20T21:15:00.000+01:00

“Love meant to take refuge from one's own world in another's, and so in spite of his jealousy and shame he had left Ruzena in her world, so that her flight to him should be ever sweet and new” (Broch, 1964: 49).

#216

2010-09-20T21:01:00.000+01:00

“The (...) novel no longer serves as “entertainment and instruction” (Broch) and its authors no longer relate the unusual, unheard-of “incident” (Goethe) or tell a story from which the reader will get “advice” (Walter Benjamin). It rather confronts him with problems and perplexities in which the reader must be prepared to engage himself if he is to understand it at all. The result of this transformation has been that the most accessible and popular art has become one of the most difficult and esoteric. The medium of suspense has disappeared and with it the possibility of passive fascination; the novelist's ambition to create the illusion of a higher reality or to accomplish the transfiguration of the real together with the revelation of its manifold significance has yielded to the intention to involve the reader in something which is at least as much a process of thought as of artistic invention” (Arendt, 1964: V).

BROCH, Hermann (1964). The Sleepwalkers. Translation by Willa and Edwin Muir. New York: Grosset & Dunlap.

#215

2010-09-10T19:00:00.001+01:00

“Already she is adapting herself, as she will adapt herself to every new régime. This morning I even heard her talking reverently about 'Der Führer' to the porter's wife. If anybody were to remind her that, at the elections last November, she voted communist, she would probably deny it hotly, and in perfect good faith. She is merely acclimatizing herself, in accordance to her natural law, like an animal which changes its coat for winter” (id, 489).

#214

2010-09-10T18:50:00.000+01:00

“Everything in the room is like that: unnecessarily solid, abnormally heavy and dangerously sharp. Here, at the writing-table, I am confronted by a phalanx of metal objects – a pair of candlesticks shaped like entwined serpents, an ashtray from which emerges the head of a crocodile, a paperknife copied from a Florentine dagger, a brass dolphin holding the end of its tail a small broken clock. What becomes of such things? How could they ever be destroyed? They will probably remain intact for thousands of years: people will treasure them in museums” (Isherwood, 1999: 244).

ISHERWOOD, Christopher (1999). The Berlin Novels. London: Vintage Books.

#213

2010-09-05T19:44:00.001+01:00

“The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense” (Nabokov, 2000: 27).

NABOKOV, Vladimir (2000). Pnin. London: Penguin Books.

#212

2010-09-05T19:39:00.001+01:00

“In serene retrospect, however, and judged by artistic and scholarly standards alone, the books produced in vacuo by émigré writers seem today, whatever their individual faults, more permanent and more suitable for human consumption than the slavish, singularly provincial and conventional streams of political consciousness that came during those same years from the pens of Soviet authors whom a fatherly state provided with ink, pipes and pullovers” (id, 213).

#211

2010-09-05T10:06:00.001+01:00

“Nature expects a full-grown man to accept the two black voids, fore and aft, as stolidly as he accepts the extraordinary visions in between. Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much” (Nabokov, 2000: 5).

NABOKOV, Vladimir (2000). Speak, Memory. London: Penguin Books.

#210

2010-08-14T19:15:00.000+01:00

“No importa lo que buscan, sino lo que encuentran” (id, 260).

#209

2010-08-14T19:13:00.000+01:00

“Mientras tuvieron cerca al león, por su influjo se abandonaran a la antigua naturaleza animal que hay en lo profundo del hombre. Fueron agresivos, crueles, cobardes, estúpidos. Retirada la fiera por los peones municipales, en todos prevaleció de nuevo el criterio humano, sin duda impuro de hipocresía, pero también refulgente de compasión y de coraje” (id, 210).

#208

2010-08-14T19:05:00.000+01:00

“Desde muy joven he comprendido que para no dejarse arrasar por la inconsiderada producción de libros y para conseguir, siquiera en aparencia, una cultura enciclopédica, era imprescindible un plan de lecturas” (Casares, 2007: 47).

CASARES, Adolfo Bioy (2007). Historias Fantásticas. Madrid: Alianza Editorial.

#207

2010-08-02T12:51:00.000+01:00

“Don't you see, it isn't that women mean too little to me – what's caused the trouble is that they mean so much” (id, 245).

#206

2010-08-02T12:48:00.000+01:00

“Now I am sure that many of the young women (...) who set themselves up as specialists in loving hadn't a very clear idea of how strong a charge their emotions got from the instinct of survival – or how much those emotions arose out of the yearning to own and be owned rather than from a reservoir of pure and selfless love that was the special property of themselves and their gender. After all, how lovable are men? Particularly men “unable to love”? No, there was more to all that talk about “permanent relationships” than many young women (and their chosen mates) were able to talk about or able at that time fully to understand: the more was the fact of female dependence, defenselessness, and vulnerability” (id, 171).

#205

2010-08-02T12:40:00.000+01:00

“I'm yours. I'll do anything. Come and go as you like. Let me feed you. let me sit with you at night and watch you read. You can do anything you want to my body. I'll do anything you say. Just have dinner with me sometimes and use some of these things. And I'll never utter a peep. I'll be good as gold. I won't ask what you do when you go away. You don't don't have to take me anywhere. Just stay here sometimes and make use of whatever you want, including me. You see, I have these thick bath-sized towels and Belgian lace tablecloths, all this lovely crockery, three bathrooms, two televisions, and two million dollars (...), I have these breasts and this vagina, these limbs, this skin – and no life” (Roth, 1993: 153).

ROTH, Philip (1993). My Life As A Man. Vintage: New York.

#204

2010-07-28T08:23:00.000+01:00

“ESTRAGON: We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?
VLADIMIR: [Impatiently] Yes, yes, we're magicians” (id, 61).

#203

2010-07-28T08:20:00.000+01:00

“POZZO: He's Stopped crying. [To ESTRAGON] You have replaced him as it were. [Lyrically] The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true for laugh. [He laughs] Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessor” (id, 25).

#202

2010-07-28T08:14:00.000+01:00

“ESTRAGON: Who believes him?
VLADIMIR: Everybody. It's the only version they know.
ESTRAGON: People are bloody ignorant apes” (Beckett, 2006: 5).

BECKETT, Samuel (2006). Waiting For Godot. London: Faber And Faber.

Bustrofedon #1

2010-07-18T16:06:00.001+01:00

I am always sad when finishing a book because it's never my own.

#200

2010-07-18T16:03:00.000+01:00

“By now the passion between us is no longer quite what it was on those Sundays when we would cling together in my bed until three in the afternoon – “the primrose path to madness”, as Claire once described those rapacious exertions which end finally with the two of us rising on the legs of weary travelers to change the bed linens, to stand embracing beneath the shower, and then go out of doors to get some air before the winter sun goes down” (Roth, 2000: 198).

ROTH, Philip (2000). Professor Of Desire. London: Vintage.

#199

2010-07-18T15:52:00.000+01:00

“No me miro para ver si estoy bien o mal, sino solamente para saber si soy” (id, 378).

#198

2010-07-18T15:46:00.000+01:00

“Me gusta acordarme de las coses más que vivirlas o vivir las cosas sabiendo que nunca se pierden porque puedo evocarlas” (id, 321).

#197

2010-07-18T15:37:00.000+01:00

"Si los sueños de la razón dan monstruos, ¿qué dan los sueños de la sinrazóm?" (id, 169)

#196

2010-06-20T16:23:00.000+01:00

“¿Doctor usted cree que yo debo volver al teatro? Dice mi marido que todo lo que tengo es que ahora almaceno mi energía nerviosa y no la gasto nunca. Al menos, antes, en el teatro, podía imaginarme que era otra” (id, 130).

#195

2010-06-20T16:18:00.001+01:00

“Debía haberle dicho que corrí el mundo desde mi pueblo hasta La Habana, que aquí terminó mi impulso, que escribí un libro de sonetos y unos cuentos” (id, 53).

#194

2010-06-20T16:09:00.000+01:00

“En el foso que era mi oficio del siglo XX: ni artista ni técnico ni artesano ni obrero ni científico ni lumpen ni puta: un híbrido, una cruza, un engendro, un parturiunt montes (...) nascetur ridiculus mus. Un publicitario, vaya” (Infante, 2008: 41).

INFANTE, Guillermo Cabrera (2008). Tres Tristes Tigres. New York: Rayo.

#193

2010-06-10T10:16:00.000+01:00

“War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted... secretly it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology... by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the energy-burst of war” (id, 529-530).

#192

2010-05-30T10:30:00.001+01:00

“We are obsessed with building labyrinths, where before there was only open aplin and sky. To draw ever more complex patterns on the blank sheet. We cannot abide to that openness: it is terror to us” (id, 268).

#191

2010-05-15T12:03:00.000+01:00

“What did Caesar really whisper to his protégé as he fell? Et tu, Brute, the official lie, is about what you'd expect to get from them – it says exactly nothing. The moment of of assassination is the moment when power and the ignorance of power come together, with Death as validator” (id, 167).

#190

2010-05-10T15:50:00.000+01:00

“The War needs to divide this way, and to subdivide, though its propaganda will always stress unity, alliance, pulling together. The War does not appear to want a folk-consciousness, not even of the sort the Germans have engineered, ein Volk ein Fürher – it wants a machine of many separate parts, not oneness, but a complexity... Yet who can presume to say what the War wants, so vast and aloof is it... so absentee. Perhaps the War isn't even an awareness – not a life at all, really. There may only be some cruel, accidental resemblance to life” (id, 133).

#189

2010-05-10T15:30:00.000+01:00

“It was widely believed in those days that behind the War – all the death, savagery, and destruction – lay the Fürher-principle. But if personalities could be replaced by abstractions of power, if techniques developed by the corporations could be brought to bear, might not nations live rationally? One of the dearest Postwar hopes: that there should be no room for a terrible disease like charisma... that its rationalization should proceed while we had the time and resources” (Pynchon, 2006: 82).

PYNCHON, Thomas (2006). Gravity's Rainbow. London: Penguin.

#188

2010-05-04T15:35:00.000+01:00

“It is as if, for Rabelais, the inventor of a narrative is not obliged to bring coherence, logic or resolution to the text. That (as Diderot would later make clear) is the task of the reader, the mark of his freedom” (id, 277).

#187

2010-05-04T15:16:00.000+01:00

“Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading – once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive – is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good. (...) In our society reading is nothing but an ancillary act, and the great repository of our memory and experience, the library, is considered less a living entity than an inconvenient storage room” (id, 223-224).

#186

2010-05-02T10:58:00.000+01:00

“Objective evidence for subjective preferences does not make the value judgement itself objective, but merely objectifies the preferences. This process brings to light those predilections that govern us. These can be then seen as an expression of personal norms (...) and in being exposed they open up an intersubjective means of access to our value judgements” (Iser, 1980: 25).

ISER, Wolfgang (1980). The Act Of Reading. A Theory Of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore, Londres: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

#185

2010-04-30T08:29:00.000+01:00

“The world encyclopedia, the universal library, exists, and is the world itself” (id, 89).

#184

2010-04-28T09:21:00.001+01:00

“God, the legend tells us, invented the multiplicity of languages in order to prevent us from working together, so we would not overreach our powers” (Manguel, 2008: 19).

MANGUEL, Alberto (2008). The Library At Night. London, New Haven: Yale University Press.

#183

2010-04-27T16:17:00.000+01:00

“As Madame Bovary, however, became a worldwide success, when at first it was understood and appreciated as a turning-point in the history of the novel by only a small circle of connoisseurs, the audience of novel-readers that was formed by it came to sanction the new canon of expectations; this canon made Feydeau's weaknesses – his flowery style, his modish effects, his lyrical-confessional cliches – unbearable, and allowed Fanny to fade into yesterday's bestseller” (Jauss, 2007: 28).

JAUSS, Hans Robert (2007). Toward An Aesthetic Of Reception. Translation by Timothy Bahti. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press.

A Chronicle Of Early Failure I

2010-04-17T10:35:00.000+01:00

“Becoming a writer is not a “career decision” like becoming a doctor or a policeman: you don't chose it so much as you get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you're not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days. Unless you turn out to be a favorite of the gods (and woe to the man who banks on that), your work will never bring in enough to support you, and if you mean to have a roof over your head and not starve to death you must resign yourself to doing other work to pay the bills” (Auster, 1998: 4).

AUSTER, Paul (1998). Hand To Mouth. A Chronicle Of Early Failure. London: Faber And Faber.

#181

2010-04-16T19:28:00.001+01:00

“Cool media are high in participation, on completion, by the audience. And I have always taken that to heart, that sometimes it can be a dangerous practice.
I'm not reader-friendly. I do ask something of the reader, and many reviewers say I ask too much; even some of them who like my work say, but it's work, it's difficult; and as I say, it's not reader-friendly.
Though I think it is, and I think that a reader gets satisfaction out of participating in, collaborating, if you will, with the writer, so that ends up being between the reader and the page, without this whole world of giving readings” (id, 229-230).

“Now everybody–”

2010-04-16T19:13:00.001+01:00

“I feel like part of the vanishing breed that thinks a writer should be read and not heard, let alone seen. I think this is because there seems so often today to be a tendency to put the person in the place of his or her work, to turn the creative artist into a performing one, to find what a writer says about writing somehow more valid, or more real, than the writing itself” (id, 222).

#179

2010-04-15T21:35:00.000+01:00

“We are thousands and they are millions, write the fiction they want or don't write at all, ruling out Pound's cry for the new, the challenging or what's labeled difficult, so when Gravity's Rainbow is being devoured by college youth everywhere and wins the National Book Award, its unanimous recommendation by the Pulitzer jury is overturned by the trustees for a double-talk spoof of academic vagaries by a bogus “Professor”” (id, 42).

On religion

2010-04-15T17:58:00.000+01:00

“In other words, we are all in the same line of business: that of concocting, arranging, and peddling fictions to get us safely through the night” (id, 189).

The rush for second place

2010-04-15T17:55:00.000+01:00

“The day's mail brings flyers offering courses in Mid-life Crisis, Stress Management, Success Through Assertiveness, Reflexology, Shiatsu, Hypnocybernetics, and The Creative You. Books disappear overnight or are instant “best-sellers”: mortifying confessionals and est, group therapy, primal screams and “making it,” pious plagiaries on moral fiction and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's TM Technique for reducing blood pressure and increasing self-esteem. Even impotence is briefly chic; the movie screen offers the dreary sentimental humanisms of Woody Allen achieved at the expense of cast and audience alike and, for the beer crowd, Rocky” (id, 142).

#176

2010-04-15T17:40:00.002+01:00

“These poets and other artists must not show indecency and intemperance so the first thing to be done is to censor writers of fiction or they'll corrupt the citizens growing up among images of moral deformity, because youth can't tell the difference between allegory and what's literal” (id, 47).

#175

2010-04-15T17:35:00.001+01:00

“Write what they want and you'll end up with a Pulitzer Prize follow you tight to the grave. Maybe won the George Cross even the Nobel but once you've been stigmatized with the ultimate seal of mediocrity your obit will read Pulitzer Prize Novelist Dies (...) The prize winners? They're just props, cartoonists, sports writers, political pundits, front page photos the bloodier the better for that instant of fame wrap the fish in tomorrow, good God how many Pulitzer Prizes are there? Over fifteen hundred entries, fourteen categories” (id, 41).

#174

2010-04-15T17:22:00.000+01:00

“Of course you can't really explain anything to anybody that's why all we hear are explanations of these explanations get right back to Wiener with his more complicated the message the more chance for error” (id, 36).

#173

2010-04-07T16:21:00.000+01:00

“Sex is difficult to write about because it's just not sexy enough. The only way to write about it is not to write much. Let the reader bring his own sexuality into the text. A writer I usually admire has written about sex in the most off-putting way. There is just too much information. If you start saying “the curve of...” you soon sound like gynecologist. Only Joyce could get away with that. He said all those forbidden words. He said cunt, and that was shocking. The forbidden word can be provocative. But after it becomes monotonous rather than arousing. Less is always better” (id, 147).

#172

2010-04-07T16:06:00.000+01:00

“That's what my work is about, the collapse of everything, of meaning, of language, of values, of art, disorder and dislocation wherever you look, entropy drowning everything in sight, entertainment and technology and every four year old with a computer, everybody his own artist where the whole thing came from, the binary system and the computer where the technology came from the first place, you see? (...) whole stupified mob out there waiting to be entertained, turning the creative artist into a performer, into a celebrity like Byron, the man in the place of its work” (Gaddis, 3-4).

GADDIS, William (2004). Agapē Agape And Other Writings. London: Atlantic Books.

#171

2010-03-27T09:14:00.000Z

“Your fear of death removes the fear.
Why then was this forbid? Why but to awe,
Why but to keep ye low and ignorant,
His worshippers; he knows that in the day
Ye eat thereof, your eyes that seem so clear,
Yet are but dim, shall perfectly be then
Opened and cleared, and ye shall be gods,
Knowing both good and evil as they know.”(id, IX. 702-709)

#170

2010-03-27T09:04:00.000Z

“O foul descent! That I who erst contended
With Gods to sit the highest, am now constrained
Into a beast, and mixed with bestial slime,
This essence to incarnate and imbrute,
That to the heighth of Deity aspired” (id, IX. 163-167)

#169

2010-03-27T08:57:00.000Z

“(...) In solitude
What happiness, who can enjoy alone,
or all enjoying, what contentment find?” (id, VIII. 364-366)

#168

2010-03-27T08:49:00.000Z

“But knowledge is food , and needs no less
Her temperance over appetite, to know
In measure what the mind may well contain,
Oppresses else with surfeit, and soon turns
Wisdom to folly, as nourishment to wind.” (id, VII. 124-130)

#167

2010-03-24T10:06:00.000Z

“One fatal Tree there stands of Knowledge called,
Forbidden them to taste: knowledge forbidd'n?
Suspicious, reasonless. Why should their Lord
Envy them that? Can it be sin to know,
Can it be death? And do they only stand
By ignorance, is that their happy state,
The proof of their obedience and their faith?
O fair foundation laid whereon to build
Their ruin!” (id, IV. 514-522)

#166

2010-03-24T09:59:00.000Z

“Free, and to none accountable, preferring
Hard liberty before the easy yoke
Of servile pomp” (id, II. 255-257)

#165

2010-03-24T09:55:00.000Z

“Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n” (id, I. 263)

#164

2010-03-24T09:48:00.000Z

“Innumerable force of Spirits armed
That durst dislike his reign, and me preferring,
His utmost power with adverse power opposed
In dubious battle on the plains of Heav'n,
And shook his throne. What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield:
And what else is not to be overcome?” (Milton, I. 101-109)

MILTON, John (2003). Paradise Lost. London: Penguin Books.

#163

2010-03-15T20:09:00.000Z

“Understanding the world for a man is reducing it to the human, stamping it with his seal” (Camus, 2000: 23).

CAMUS, Albert (2000). The Myth Of Sisyphus. Translation by Justin O'Brien. London: Penguin Books.

#162

2010-03-10T14:46:00.000Z

“It's the price of being a writer. One is dogged by the past – pain, sensations, rejections, all of it. I believe that this clinging to the past is a zealous, albeit hopeless, desire to reinvent it so that one could change it. Doctors, lawyers, and many other stable citizens are not afflicted by a persistent memory. In their way, they might be just as disturbed as you or I, except that they don't know it. They don't delve” (id, 103).

#161

2010-03-10T14:41:00.000Z

“The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There the novel has no place. In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties” (id, 100).

#160

2010-03-10T14:34:00.000Z

“I have never written about things as they happened. All my works are indeed chapters from my most personal experience, but nevertheless they are not “the story of my life.” The things that happened to me in my life have already happened, they are already formed, and time has kneaded them and give them shape. To write things as they happened means to enslave oneself to memory, which is only a minor element in the creative process. To my mind, to create means to order, sort out, and choose the words and pace that fit the work. The materials are indeed materials from one's life, but ultimately the creation is an independent creature” (Roth, 2002: 27).

ROTH, Philip (2002). Shop Talk. London: Vintage.