Reading Notes

#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.

#210

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

#209

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

#203

“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

“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.

#200

“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.