#218

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

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

#212

“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

“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.