“When I begin to think at all I get into states of disgust and fury at the way the mob is going on (meaning by mob, chiefly Dukes, crown princes, and such like persons) that I choke; and have to go to the British Museum and look at Penguins till I get cool. I find Penguins at present the only comfort in life. One feels everything in the world so sympathetically ridiculous; one can’t be angry when one looks at a Penguin.”
– John Ruskin, letter to Charles Eliot Norton, 4 November 1860
“Also, because it’s my town out there, I’m conscious of the possibility that the person I bump into might be myself.”
– Geoff Dyer, “Ship Write,” Guernica 4 September 2012
“Her departure was staggeringly definitive.”
– Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being [via]
“Un grand écrivain se remarque au nombre de pages qu’il ne publie pas.”
“Vaincre le hasard mot pour mot.”
– Stéphane Mallarmé
“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
“I often feel one drink away from whatever makes dogs hump women’s legs.”
– Greg Baxter, A Preparation for Death (2010)
“Ah ! princesse, vous n’êtes pas Guermantes pour des prunes.”
– Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu
“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
“I’ve always tried to avoid the expected word.”
– Christine Brooke-Rose, 2002
“…’Everything is to be found in Peter Rabbit,’ the Consul liked to say…”
– Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
ANDREW GALLIX 