“An incautious step will put the male visitor in a landscape which looks as though it is panties as far as the eye can see. The same situation could occur, doubtless, in Selfridges or Barker’s, but it wouldn’t feel the same.”
– Ian Nairn, Nairn’s Paris
“Writing happens in space — it happens to a body, which is in touch with time and things, and which tries to enclose itself and connect itself to real and fantastical outsides, to make itself at home and fling itself abroad in a mobile analogue of home.”
– Brian Dillon, I Am Sitting in a Room, 2011
“Sebald understands that a life is an edifice, which we build partly to hide its foundations.”
– James Meek, “W.G. Sebald, Humorist,” The New Yorker June 5 & 12 2017
“Car nous sommes où nous ne sommes pas.”
– Pierre-Jean Jouve, Lyrique
“I become aware of myself, too close, like a stranger sitting down right next to me in a train carriage full of empty seats.”
– Rachel Cusk, Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation, 2012
“He says, sometimes you say things before you’ve understood them yourself. For you the saying is a kind of working out, he says, like doing a sum on a bit of paper.”
– Rachel Cusk, Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation, 2012
“We are all animals, and therefore, we are continually being attracted. That this attraction should extend to what is called love is a human misfortune cultivated by novelists. It is the horror we feel of ourselves, that is of being alone with ourselves, which draws us to love, but this love should happen only once, and never be repeated, if we have, as we should, learnt our lesson, which is that we are, all and each one of us, always and always alone.”
– Henry Green, Letter to G.W. 9 June 1954
