Month: October 2023

“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)

“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)

“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”

“Their father had been a learned man, an author; he died, of course, in poverty, but he had managed before he died to give his children an excellent education; he left a lot of books too.” – Ivan S. Turgenev, “The Country Doctor”

“In all human beings, if only understanding be brought to the business, dignity will be found, and that dignity cannot fail to reveal itself, soon or late, in the words and phrases with which they make known their high hopes and aspirations and cry out against the intolerable meaninglessness of life.” – H.L. Mencken, The American Language