“Her departure was staggeringly definitive.”
– Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being [via]
Category Archives: Quotes
Quotes
“Un grand écrivain se remarque au nombre de pages qu’il ne publie pas.”
“Vaincre le hasard mot pour mot.”
– Stéphane Mallarmé
Quotes
“MG: Talking of our generation — I mean ours (we’re exactly the same age) — a real symptom of it, as this conversation is so aptly demonstrating, is that we keep referencing theory when we talk about our work. More than that: theory informs the making of it.
TMCC: But that’s always the case, even for people who claim not to ‘have’ theory. ‘Not’ having theory just means having crap theory, i.e. adhering to a humanism that has erased all traces of its own constructedness.”
– Tom McCarthy and Margarita Gluzberg, “Circuits and Loops,” BOMBlog 4 May 2012
Quotes
“I often feel one drink away from whatever makes dogs hump women’s legs.”
– Greg Baxter, A Preparation for Death (2010)
Quotes
“Ah ! princesse, vous n’êtes pas Guermantes pour des prunes.”
– Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu
Quotes
“There’s nothing terrible inside us or on earth or possibly in heaven itself except what hasn’t been said yet. We won’t be easy in our minds until everything has been said once and for all, then we’ll fall silent and we’ll no longer be afraid of keeping still. That will be the day.”
– Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night
Quotes
“I’ve always tried to avoid the expected word.”
– Christine Brooke-Rose, 2002
Quotes
“…’Everything is to be found in Peter Rabbit,’ the Consul liked to say…”
– Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
Quotes
“Every love story is a ghost story.”
– David Foster Wallace, The Pale King 2011. [The same line appears in “Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko”, a story included in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. D.T. Max, DFW’s biographer, explains that the author would attribute the phrase to Virginia Woolf, but it apparently comes from Christina Stead.]
Quotes
“To me, art almost always speaks more forcefully when it appears in an imperfect, accidental, and fragmentary way, somehow just signaling its presence, allowing one to feel it through the ineptitude of the interpretation. I prefer the Chopin that reaches me in the street from an open window to the Chopin served in great style from the concert stage.”
– Witold Gombrowicz, Diaries 1953
[See Ben Lerner.]
ANDREW GALLIX 