Category: Lit & Crit
“We all know that time, this undisciplined element, holds itself within bounds but precariously, thanks to unceasing cultivation, meticulous care, and a continuous regulation and correction of its excesses. Free of this vigilance, it immediately begins to do tricks, run wild, play irresponsible practical jokes, and indulge in crazy clowning.” – Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (trans. Wieniewska)
“Parenting is hard. As any one who has gone through the process and had enough leisure (and still functioning brain cells) to reflect on it knows, a lot of it is a crapshoot. Things go wrong that you have no control over, and, on occasion, things also go right, and you have no control over those, either. The experience is scary and exhilarating and often humiliating, not because you’re disappointed in your kids, necessarily, but because you’re disappointed in yourself.” — Elizabeth Kolbert, “America’s Top Parent”
“Suffering that is limitless, suffering that is stubbornly enclosed within the circle of its own mania, suffering to the point of distraction, of self-mutilation, becomes in the end unbearable for the helpless witnesses of misfortune.” – Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (trans. Wieniewska)
“Autumn is a great touring show, poetically deceptive, an enormous purple-skinned onion disclosing ever new panoramas under each of its skins. No center can ever be reached. Behind each wing that is moved and stored away new and radiant scenes open up, true and alive for a moment, until you realize that they are made of cardboard. All perspectives are painted, all the panoramas made of board, and only the smell is authentic, the smell of wilting scenery, of theatrical dressing rooms, redolent of greasepaint and scent. And at dusk there is disorder and chaos in the wings, a pileup of discarded costumes, among which you can wade endlessly as if through yellowed fallen leaves. There is great confusion: everybody is pulling at the curtain ropes, and the sky, a great autumnal sky, hangs in tatters and is filled with the screeching of pulleys. And there is an atmosphere of feverish haste, of belated carnival, a ballroom about to empty in the small hours, a panic of masked people who cannot find their real clothes.” – Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (trans. Wieniewska)
“Regimes change, as do customs and cathedrals, but crimes are ever the same. And envy, the prime though oft-forgotten mover of crime, doesn’t fade away but grows ever blacker.” — Ismail Kadare, The Successor (trans. Papavrami & Bellos)
“Who knows the length of time when night lowers the curtain on what is happening in its depth? That short interval is enough, however, to shift the scenery, to liquidate the great enterprise of the night and all its dark fantastic pomp. You wake up frightened, with the feeling of having overslept, and you see on the horizon the bright streak of dawn and the black, solidifying mass of the earth.” – Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (trans. Wieniewska)
“A night in July! The secret fluid of dusk, the living, watchful, and mobile matter of darkness, ceaselessly shaping something out of chaos and immediately rejecting every shape. Black timber out of which caves, vaults, nooks, and niches along the path of a sleepy wanderer are constructed. Like an insistent talker, the night accompanies a lonely pilgrim, shutting him within the circle of its apparitions, indefatigable in invention and in fantasies, evoking for him starry distances, white Milky Ways, the labyrinths of successive Colosseums and Forums.” – Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (trans. Wieniewska)
“A night in July! What can be likened to it? How can one describe it? Shall I compare it to the core of an enormous black rose, covering us with the dreams of hundreds of velvety petals? The night winds blow open its fluffy center, and in its scented depth we can see the stars looking down on us.” – Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (trans. Wieniewska)
“Never work before breakfast; if you have to work before breakfast, eat your breakfast first.” — Josh Billings
“Ordinary books are like meteors. Each of them has only one moment, a moment when it soars screaming like the phoenix, all its pages aflame. For that single moment we love them ever after, although they soon turn to ashes. With bitter resignation we sometimes wander late at night through the extinct pages that tell their stone-dead messages like wooden rosary beads.” – Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (trans. Wieniewska)
“The exegetes of The Book maintain that all books aim at being authentic. That they live only a borrowed life, which at the moment of inspiration returns to its ancient source.” – Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (trans. Wieniewska)
“The Book is a myth in which we believe when we are young, but which we cease to take seriously as we get older.” – Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (trans. Wieniewska)
“Reality is as thin as paper and betrays with all its cracks its imitative character.” — Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles (trans. Wieniewska)
“No people can be great who have ceased to be virtuous.” — Samuel Johnson
“My subject had taken me up, drawn me on, and absorbed me into itself. It was necessary for me, it seemed, to write the book I had been thinking much of, even if it were destined to fall dead from the press, and I had no inclination or interest to write any other.” — John Lothrop Motley (quoted in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVI, Book II, Ch. 18)
“Animals! the object of insatiable interest, examples of the riddle of life, created, as it were, to reveal the human being to man himself, displaying his richness and complexity in a thousand kaleidoscopic possibilities, each of them brought to some curious end, to some characteristic exuberance.” — Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles (trans. Wieniewska)
“If, forgetting the respect due to the Creator, I were to attempt a criticism of creation, I would say, ‘Less matter, more form!’ Ah, what relief it would be for the world to lose some of its contents.” — Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles (trans. Wieniewska)
“Nothing so much contributes to promote the public well-being as the exportation of manufactured goods.” — Robert Walpole (quoted by John Cassidy in “Enter the Dragon”)
“There are actually people who do nothing but invest in European mid-cap health care debt. I don’t think the problem is specific to finance. I think that parochialism is common to modern intellectual life. There is no attempt to integrate.” — Charlie Ledley (from The Big Short, by Michael Lewis)
“Our lives, the big and magnificent lives we can just barely make out beneath the mere facts of our lifestyles, are always trying to occur. But save for a few rare occasions–falling in love, the birth of a child, the death of a parent, a revelatory moment in nature–they don’t occur; the big magnificence is withdrawn. Stories rub at the facts of our lives. They give us access–if only for a few hours, if only in bed at the end of the day–to what’s beneath.” — Jonathan Safran Foer (from his foreword to the Penguin Classics edition of Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories (emphasis in the original))
“We live on the surface of our planet. Human life happens on a shell as thin, relative to the size of the earth, as an egg’s, or as thin as the paint on a wall. We have lifestyles on the surfaces of our lives: habits and culture, clothes, modes of transit, calendars, papers in wallets, ways of killing time, answers to the question ‘What do you do?’ We come home from long days of doing what we do and tuck ourselves under the thin sheets. We read stories printed on even thinner paper. Why, at the end of the day, do we read stories?” — Jonathan Safran Foer (from his foreword to the Penguin Classics edition of Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories)
“A skilful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents—he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction.” — Edgar Allan Poe (quoted in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVI, Book II, Ch. 14)
“Patriotism is a curious passion. It does not seem possible to love one’s own country except by hating some other country.” — Archibald MacMechan (from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVI, Book II, Ch. 10)
“I do believe in simplicity. When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation from all encumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real.” — Henry David Thoreau
“As an explanation of the mystery of existence the transcendental philosophy makes little appeal to our own hard-headed and scientific generation; but no one, assuredly, with any measure of spiritual and poetic perception can give himself sincerely and unreservedly to one of the literary masterpieces of the transcendental school, to one of the greater essays of Emerson for example, the Self-Reliance, Compensation, Spiritual Laws, or The Over-Soul, without a consciousness, as he puts down the volume, of having passed for the time into a higher sphere of being, without a deepened conviction of the triviality, the relative unreality, of material concerns, without a sense of spaciousness, of clarity, of nobility, of power, a feeling that that much abused word ‘eternal’ has suddenly put on a very real and concrete meaning. Against such an actual experience no mere argument can avail. Nor does the emotion thus evoked end in vague mystical exaltation. It leaves, rather, whether the reader profit by it or not, a distinct sense of its bearing on the daily conduct of life.” — from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XV, Book II, Ch. 8
“We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that’s often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.” — Jonah Lehrer, “The Truth Wears Off”
“The ability to listen is, perhaps, the definition of love.” — John Lahr, “Kid of Comedy”
“It can be felt as love when you want to fuck someone and can’t.” — E. L. Doctorow, “Assimilation”
“After the Revolution the novel-reading habit grew, fostered by American publishers and cried out against by many moralists whose cries appeared in magazines side by side with moral tales. Nearly every grade of sophistication applied itself to the problem. It was contested that novels were lies; that they served no virtuous purpose; that they melted rigorous minds; that they crowded out better books; that they painted adventure too romantic and love too vehement, and so unfitted readers for solid reality; that, dealing with European manners, they tended to confuse and dissatisfy republican youth. In the face of such censure, native novelists appeared late and apologetically, armed for the most part with the triple plea that the tale was true, the tendency heavenward, and the scene devoutly American.” — from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XV, Book II, Ch. 6
“Duty, as well as inclination, urges the Lay Preacher to sermonize, while others slumber. To read numerous volumes in the morning, and to observe various characters at noon, will leave but little time, except the night, to digest the one or speculate upon the other. The night, therefore, is often dedicated to composition, and while the light of the pale planets discovers at his desk the Preacher, more wan than they, he may be heard repeating emphatically with Dr. Young, ‘Darkness has much Divinity for me.’ He is then alone, he is then at peace. No companions near, but the silent volumes on his shelf, no noise abroad, but the click of the village clock, or the bark of the village dog. The Deacon has then smoked his sixth, and last pipe, and asks not a question more, concerning Josephus, or the Church. Stillness aids study, and the sermon proceeds.” — Joseph Dennie, The Lay Preacher (1796)