#227

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“(...) 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

“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

“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

“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

“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.