Quotes from Writings Past and Preternatural

Posted: 08 December 2015

Quotes written down in various nooks and crannies, moving them here to celebrate the new blog.

Goethe

The Sorrows of Young Werther

Most people toil during the greater part of their lives in order to live, and the slender part of free time that remains worries them so much that they try by every means to get rid of it.

But I ask you one favor: no more sand in the notes you write me. I took today’s quickly to my lips, and something gritted between my teeth.

Faust

So may then pleasure and distress,
Failure and success,
Follow each other as they please,
Man’s active only when he’s never at ease

Poems

And the goddess we serve? She is called Opportunity. Know her!

• Roman Elegies IV

I can put up with a lot. The things that are most of a bother
Cool and calm I endure, thanks to the gift of a god.
Just one or two are the things I abominate, or, more precisely,
Four: tobacco (the smoke), bedbugs and garlic and ✝

• Venetian Epigrams

Saturn eats his own offspring,
Doesn’t give a cuss;
Gobbles without seasoning
What else might nourish us.

Should even Shakespeare then comply
With custom hard and fast?
Says Polyphemus: Put him by,
So I can eat him last.

• Kronos As Art-Critic

Faulkner

The Sound and The Fury

I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

Then they talked about what they would do with twenty-five dollars. They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words.

It twinkled and glinted, like breathing, the float slow like breathing too, and debris half submerged, healing out to the sea and the caverns and the grottoes of the sea. The displacement of water is equal to the something of something. Reducto absurdum of all human experience, and two six-pound flat-irons weigh more than one tailor’s goose.

I seemed to be lying neither asleep nor awake looking down a long corridor of grey halflight where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical all I had done shadows all I had felt suffered taking visible form antic and perverse mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the significance they should have affirmed thinking I was I was not who was not was not who.

He looked at his watch. Then he went to the door and looked at the courthouse clock. “You ought to have a dollar watch,” I says. “It wont cost you so much to believe it’s lying each time.”

The broken flower dropped over Ben’s fist and his eyes were empty and blue and serene again as cornice and facade flowed smoothly once more from left to right; post and tree, window and doorway, and signboard, each in its ordered place.”

Murakami

Kafka on the Beach

I don’t want to rain on your parade or anything, but I wouldn’t count on escaping this place if I were you. No matter how far you run. Distance might not solve anything.

A Wild Sheep Chase

The sun climbs high in the sky, then starts down. People come, then go. The time breezes by. That’s like a picnic, isn’t it?

Whether you take a doughnut hole as blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

The sunlight penetrating my eyelids destabilized and diffused my inner darkness, making it impossible for me to bring up a precise image of the cat. Instead, what I imagined was a failed portrait, a strange, distorted picture, certain distinguishing features bearing some resemblance to the original but the most important parts missing.

I took the money from the envelope and put it in my wallet. The envelope itself I crumpled and threw in the wastebasket. So this was how secrets got started, I thought to myself.

Sometimes, when one is moving silently through such an utterly desolate landscape, an overwhelming hallucination can make one feel that oneself, as an individual human being, is slowly coming unraveled

But that night I was chilled, right to the bone, and had no intention of going outside again under any circumstances until I had warmed up all the way through. I drank one straight and ordered another. I made no attempt to remove my coat or my scarf. When a bartender asked if I wanted a snack, I ordered some cheese and ate a single slice. I tried to think, but I couldn’t get my head to work right. I didn’t even know what I wanted to think about.

Maybe I didn’t have anything else to do, but it wasn’t healthy to be looking at a watch this often.

I crossed my legs, settled into the sofa, and listened to Haydn (though if pressed, I could not have sworn it was Haydn).

I guess time doesn’t flow in order, does it– A,B,C,D? It just sort of goes where it feels like going

Garcia Marquez

100 Years of Solitude

But if you’ve come to cause disorder by making the people paint their houses blue, you can pick up your junk and go back where you came from. Because my house is going to be white, like a dove.

Contrary to the victim’s last wishes, she baptized the girl with the name Remedios. “I’m sure that’s what Arcadio meant,” she alleged. “We won’t call her Ursula because a person suffers too much with that name.

At the end, Colonel Gerineldo Marquez looked at the desolate streets, the crystal water on the almond trees, and he found himself lost in solitude.

They got into a small carriage that looked like an enormous bat, drawn by an asthmatic horse, and they went through the desolate city in the endless streets of which, split by saltiness, there was a sound of a piano lesson just like the one that Fernanda had heard during the siestas of her adolescence.

It was as if the machine guns had been loaded with caps, because their panting rattle could be heard and their incandescent spitting could be seen, but not the slightest reaction was perceived, not a cry, not even a sigh among the compact crowd that seemed petrified by an instantaneous invulnerability. Suddenly, on one side of the station, a cry of death tore open the enchantment: “Aaagh, Mother.”

Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia. The need to feel sad was becoming a vice as the years eroded her.

The priest measured him with a pitying look.
‘Oh, my son,’ he sighed. ‘It’s enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.’

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

‘He always got up with the face of a bad night,’ Victoria Guzman recalled without affection.

Yeats

My dear, my dear, I know
More than another
What makes your heart beat so;
Not even your own mother
Can know it as I know,
Who broke my heart for her
When the wild thought,
That she denies
And has forgot,
Set all her blood astir
And glittered in her eyes.

• To a Young Girl

A drunkard is a dead man,
And all dead men are drunk.

• Last lines of ‘A Drunken Man’s Praise Of Sobriety’

Like the moon her kindness is,
If kindness I may call
What has no comprehension in’t,
But is the same for all
As though my sorrow were a scene
Upon a painted wall.

So like a bit of stone I lie
Under a broken tree.
I could recover if I shrieked
My heart’s agony
To a passing bird, but I am dumb
From human dignity.

• Human Dignity

Dostoyevsky

Brothers Karamazov

This was, perhaps, a unique case of the kind in the life of Fyodor Pavlovitch, who was always of a voluptuous temper, and ready to run after any petticoat on the slightest encouragement. She seems to have been the only woman who made no particular appeal to his senses.

And close your taverns. If you can’t close all, at least two or three. And above all–don’t lie.
You mean about Diderot?
No, not about Diderot.

If he’s honest, he’ll steal; if he’s humane, he’ll murder, if he’s faithful, he’ll deceive.

I’ll tell you. He had done me no harm. But I played him a dirty trick, and ever since I have hated him.

Because it’s only to you I can tell everything; because I must, because I need you, because to-morrow I shall fly from the clouds, because to-morrow life is ending and beginning.

Let me tell you, stupid, that we here are all of little faith, only from carelessness, because we haven’t time; things are too much for us, and, in the second place, the Lord God has given us so little time, only twenty-four hours in the day, so that one hasn’t even time to get sleep enough, much less to repent of one’s sins.

‘How have you come to be an angel? That’s the only thing I want to know.’
‘For an awful piece of stupidity, Lise! Good-bye!’
‘Don’t dare to go away like that!’ Lise was beginning.
‘Lise, I have a real sorrow! I’ll be back directly, but I Have a great, great sorrow!’
And he ran out of the room.

Or, better still, [he looked] like a man who wants dreadfully to hit you but is horribly afraid you will hit him.

For any one to love a man, he must be hidden, for as soon as he shows his face, love is gone.

One can love one’s neighbors in the abstract, or even at a distance, but at close quarters it’s almost impossible.

‘You’ll live many days yet,’ the doctor would answer, ‘and months and years too.’
[patient rejoices, talks about the beauty of life]
‘Your son cannot last long,’ the doctor told my mother, as she accompanied him to the door. ‘The disease is affecting his brain’

That is a great thought. That star will rise out of the east.

Am I worth it, that another should serve me and be ordered about by me in his poverty and ignorance?

‘Madame, if you’re an experienced doctor, I’m certainly an experienced patient,’ said Mitya, with an effort to be polite.

The Idiot

‘…I see I ought to die as soon as possible though, or I, myself, shall… Leave me. Good-bye! Well now, come, tell me what do you think would be the best way for me to die? …To make a virtuous ending of it as far as may be, that is? Come, tell me!’
‘Pass by us and forgive us our happiness,’ said Myshkin in a low voice.
‘Ha, ha, ha! Just as I thought! I knew it was sure to be something like that! Though you are… you are… Well, well! You are eloquent people! Good-bye! Good-bye!’

To have a fortune, but not the wealth of Rothschild; to be of an honourable family, but one which has never distinguished itself in any way; to have a pleasing appearance expressive of nothing in particular; to have a decent education, but to have no idea what use to make of it; to have intelligence, but no ideas of one’s own; to have a good heart, but without any greatness of soul; and so on and so on.

Barbery

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

“Life’s a whore, I don’t believe in anything anymore and I’ll wallow in that idea until it makes me sick” is the very cred oof the innocent who hasn’t been able to get his way.

Kakuro was talking about birch trees and, forgetting all those psychoanalysts and intelligent people who don’t know what to do with their intelligence, I suddenly felt my spirit expand, for I was capable of grasping the utter beauty of the trees.

Misc/Unattributed

Even though punpun did not yet appreciate the bitter taste of coffee, he could slowly feel his self, growing blacker.

To overcome the inhibitions that compel me to be law-abiding, polite to my elders, and excessively nice, I’ve decided to create a supplementary persona named Francois Dillinger.

• Youth In Revolt

Personally, I like to think my brother is having a college experience like they do in the movies. I don’t mean the big fraternity party kind of movie. More like the movie where the guy meets a smart girl who wears a lot of sweaters and drinks cocoa. They talk about books and issues and kiss in the rain. I think something like that would be very good for him, especially if the girl were unconventionally beautiful.

• The Perks of Being a Wallflower

I am concerned that the new tools have moved us in unexpected ways to accept experience as a substitute for thought.

• Things That Make Us Smart

There are two major classes of error: slips and mistakes. A slip occurs when the action that is performed is not the one that is intended, such as when someone pours salt into a cup of coffee or perhaps empties the newly poured cup of coffee into the trash and starts to drink the coffee grounds. A mistake occurs when the action that is intended is wrong.

• Things That Make Us Smart

To get me through college, she gave up college and got a job at a factory. But then she fell seriously ill and had to quit. So I gave up art school and got a job.

• Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance

It was this: just because we don’t hear the lord, it doesn’t mean he’s stopped talking to us.

• Asterios Polyp

Only the whims of a bunch of petty, bickering deities could explain the random events of joy and tragedy that befall human beings.

• Asterios Polyp

As all things change to fire,
and fire exhausted
falls back into things,
the crops are sold
for money spent on food.

• Heraclitus, Fragments(22)

There are worse things in the world to be prisoners of than childhood.

• Introduction to The Grand Meaulnes