#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.

#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.