“We exist with sets of stories or lists: the ways we must feel during loss or solitude, the ways we must present the self to others, the ways we must act. But there are other and scarier ways to be.” – Amanda Goldblatt, Hard Mouth
Category: Lit & Crit
“To see a door did not mean you had to go through it.” – Amanda Goldblatt, Hard Mouth
“Human sciences dissect everything to comprehend it, and kill everything to examine it.” – Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude)
“My tongue is my enemy.” – Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude)
“‘Come, let’s argue then,’ said Prince Andrew, ‘You talk of schools,’ he went on, crooking a finger, ‘education and so forth; that is, you want to raise him’ (pointing to a peasant who passed by them taking off his cap) ‘from his animal condition and awaken in him spiritual needs, while it seems to me that animal happiness is the only happiness possible, and that is just what you want to deprive him of. I envy him, but you want to make him what I am, without giving him my means. Then you say, “lighten his toil.” But as I see it, physical labor is as essential to him, as much a condition of his existence, as mental activity is to you or me. You can’t help thinking. I go to bed after two in the morning, thoughts come and I can’t sleep but toss about till dawn, because I think and can’t help thinking, just as he can’t help plowing and mowing; if he didn’t, he would go to the drink shop or fall ill. Just as I could not stand his terrible physical labor but should die of it in a week, so he could not stand my physical idleness, but would grow fat and die. The third thing—what else was it you talked about?’ and Prince Andrew crooked a third finger. ‘Ah, yes, hospitals, medicine. He has a fit, he is dying, and you come and bleed him and patch him up. He will drag about as a cripple, a burden to everybody, for another ten years. It would be far easier and simpler for him to die. Others are being born and there are plenty of them as it is. It would be different if you grudged losing a laborer—that’s how I regard him—but you want to cure him from love of him. And he does not want that. And besides, what a notion that medicine ever cured anyone! Killed them, yes!’ said he, frowning angrily and turning away from Pierre.” – Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude)
“It is not given to man to know what is right and what is wrong. Men always did and always will err, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.” – Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude)
“To an imagination of any scope the most far-reaching form of power is not money, it is the command of ideas.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., “The Path of the Law”
“All we can know is that we know nothing. And that’s the height of human wisdom.” – Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude)
“Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly.” – Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude)
“What was that African proverb? A person who has not known pain will hear the sound of weeping and think it is song.” – Sandra Jackson-Opoku, “Diomedéa” (emphasis in original)
“No one has ever complained yet of being too much loved.” – Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude)
“The sisters walked to the church, which was one of those simple buildings, four walls, a door, a crucifix, and twenty folding chairs. Those folding chairs were multidimensional. Set them up facing the front, and they served as pews. Circle them around a teacher in the middle, and you had Sunday School. Push them up to card tables, and you feasted on donated food. Fold those chairs, stack them in a corner, and you cleared a dance space. Folding chairs proved the existence of God.” – Sherman Alexie, Reservation Blues
“I remembered my last visit to the wonderful city of Turin in northern Italy. I’d been struck by how contained and elegant that place was—actually a French city, due to the long shadow of the House of Savoy. Etched in my memory was the serenity of its daily life, which one sensed as a dangerous creator of unexpected absurdities or impressive outbreaks of madness, like Friedrrich Nietzsche’s, when in January 1889 he left his hotel and on the corner of Via Cesare Battisti and Via Carlo Alberto, sobbing, hugged the neck of a horse being whipped by its owner. That day an unstable border broke open for Nietzsche, which had seemed to separate rationality from delirium for several centuries. That day, the writer distanced himself definitively from humanity, however you want to look at it. To put it more simply, he went crazy; although according to Milan Kundera, maybe he was just apologizing to the horse for Descartes.” – Enrique Vila-Matas, The Illogic of Kassel (trans. Anne McLean & Anna Milsom)
“Anyone who dedicated himself to literature had not renounced the world; the world had simply evicted him, or never admitted him as a tenant. Nothing serious, then; in the end, a poet was someone for whom the world didn’t even exist, because, for him, there was only the radiance of the eternal outside.” – Enrique Vila-Matas, The Illogic of Kassel (trans. Anne McLean & Anna Milsom)
“It might be an enviable thing to experience genius and dance it in the form of a tango.” – Enrique Vila-Matas, The Illogic of Kassel (trans. Anne McLean & Anna Milsom)
“My advice: never marry till you can say to yourself that you have done all you are capable of, and until you have ceased to love the woman of your choice and have seen her plainly as she is, or else you will make a cruel and irrevocable mistake. Marry when you are old and good for nothing—or all that is good and noble in you will be lost. It will all be wasted on trifles.” – Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude)
“He spoke with such self-confidence that his hearers could not be sure whether what he said was very witty or very stupid.” – Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude)
“There was a people that had a chief temple, wherein dwelt a bloodthirsty deity, behind a curtain, guarded by priests. Once fearless hands tore the curtain away. Then all the people saw, instead of a god, a huge, shaggy, voracious spider, like a loathsome cuttlefish. They beat it and shoot at it: it is dismembered already; but still in the frenzy of its final agony it stretches over all the ancient temple its disgusting, clawing tentacles. And the priests, themselves under sentence of death, push into the monster’s grasp all whom they can seize in their terrified, trembling fingers.” – Aleksandr I. Kuprin, “The Outrage—A True Story,” (from Best Russian Short Stories, ed. Thomas Seltzer)
“Every time that some dastardly event or some ignominious failure has occurred, after executing a martyr in a dark corner of a fortress, or after deceiving public confidence, some one who is hidden and unapproachable gets frightened of the people’s anger and diverts its vicious element upon the heads of innocent Jews. Whose diabolical mind invents these pogroms—these titanic blood-lettings, these cannibal amusements for the dark, bestial souls?” – Aleksandr I. Kuprin, “The Outrage—A True Story,” (from Best Russian Short Stories, ed. Thomas Seltzer)
“The bourgeois paterfamilias was specially devised by Heaven to utter commonplaces and trivialities.” – Aleksandr I. Kuprin, “The Outrage—A True Story,” (from Best Russian Short Stories, ed. Thomas Seltzer)
“Not to marry a young Woman.
Not to be peevish or morose, or suspicious.
Not to tell the same story over and over to the same People.
Not to be covetous.
Not to be over severe with young People, but give Allowances for their youthfull follyes and weaknesses.
Not to be too free of advise, nor trouble any but those that desire it.
Not to talk much, nor of my self.
Not to boast of my former beauty, or strength, or favor with Ladyes, etc.
Not to hearken to Flatteryes, nor conceive I can be beloved by a young woman.
Not to be positive or opiniative.
Not to sett up for observing all these Rules; for fear I should observe none.
Desire some good Friends to inform me which of these Resolutions I break, or neglect, & wherein; and reform accordingly.” – Jonathan Swift, “Resolutions When I Come to Be Old”
“There are silent conspiracies between people who seem to understand one another without talking, quiet rebellions that take place in the world every minute without being noticed; groups form by chance, unplanned reunions in the middle of the park or on a dark corner, occasionally allowing us to be optimistic about the future of humanity. They join together for a few minutes and then go their separate ways, all enlisting in the hidden fight against moral misery. One day, they will rise up with unheard-of fury and blow everything to bits.” – Enrique Vila-Matas, The Illogic of Kassel (trans. Anne McLean & Anna Milsom)
“When all is said and done, life is governed by all sorts of misunderstandings.” – Enrique Vila-Matas, The Illogic of Kassel (trans. Anne McLean & Anna Milsom)
“Contrary to what so many believe, no one writes to entertain, although literature might be one of the most entertaining things around; no one writes to ‘tell stories,’ although literature is full of brilliant tales. No, one writes to take the reader captive, to possess, seduce, subjugate, to enter into the spirit of another and stay there, to touch, to win the reader’s heart . . .” – Enrique Vila-Matas, The Illogic of Kassel (trans. Anne McLean & Anna Milsom)(emphasis in original)(ellipsis in original)
“Nothing dies of too much love.” – Paul Simon, “The Lord (Part 1)”
“Every story leads to another story, which in turn leads to another story, and so on to infinity.” – Enrique Vila-Matas, The Illogic of Kassel (trans. Anne McLean & Anna Milsom)
“The whole of your life you get only so much of a sky as you can, in the splinter of the moment, smuggle, but then you get a moment, and the whole of heaven is the tip of a twister and it’s you, you’re the twister, you got the power.” – Alan Sincic, “One Shot Beetle”
“You think the body belongs to you, that it will always bend to your will, that with a simple word, size of a mustard seed, you can deploy the finger to find the itch, or—way off yonder there at the far end of the territory—set the toes to tapping or legs to running or, someday all of a sudden, cast that whole mountain of flesh into the sea. But then you find it don’t belong to you, the body, not really, not when the fear settles and the bone in the socket locks. The heart booms. The body wobbles. The—out the lungs it goes, that last little bit of sky.” – Alan Sincic, “One Shot Beetle”
“To live in a world of stones and bones and flesh and blood, you gotta touch and taste and smell, you gotta gather up the flavor of the day.” – Alan Sincic, “One Shot Beetle”
“Where the sea and the land collide they call it the line of the coast, the coastline, as if a line is what it is and not a wreck in the making, a blur where the water breaks and the earth buckles and the spray of the salt obliterates the hand that holds the map. Nobody knows nothing.” – Alan Sincic, “One Shot Beetle”