#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.

#199

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

#198

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

#197

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

#196

“¿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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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).