“When we went to the district-commandant to enlist, we were a class of twenty young men, many of whom proudly shaved for the first time before going to the barracks. We had no definite plans for our future. Our thoughts of a career and occupation were as yet of too unpractical a character to furnish any scheme of life. We were still crammed full of vague ideas which gave to life, and to the war also an ideal and almost romantic character. We were trained in the army for ten weeks and in this time more profoundly influenced than by ten years at school. We learned that a bright button is weightier than four volumes of Schopenhauer. At first astonished, then embittered, and finally indifferent, we recognised that what matters is not the mind but the boot brush, not intelligence but the system, not freedom but drill. We became soldiers with eagerness and enthusiasm, but they have done everything to knock that out of us. After three weeks it was no longer incomprehensible to us that a braided postman should have more authority over us than had formerly our parents, our teachers, and the whole gamut of culture from Plato to Goethe. With our young, awakened eyes we saw that the classical conception of the Fatherland held by our teachers resolved itself here into a renunciation of personality such as one would not ask of the meanest servants—salutes, springing to attention, parade-marches, presenting arms, right wheel, left wheel, clicking the heels, insults, and a thousand pettifogging details. We had fancied our task would be different, only to find we were to be trained for heroism as though we were circus-ponies. But we soon accustomed ourselves to it. We learned in fact that some of these things were necessary, but the rest merely show. Soldiers have a fine nose for such distinctions.” – Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (trans. Wheen)
Category: Lit & Crit
“What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
“The writers from the provinces are usually rescued from their dream of becoming writers, a terrible dream, difficult to abandon, when their parents die in the provinces and leave them an apartment or a small factory or, in the worst case, a widow and a few mouths to feed, and the writer from the provinces must return to his province, where invariably he ends up establishing a literary workshop; there, he preaches the goodness of the capital and convinces his students that there, in the capital, something really happens, and sooner rather than later, the students end up leaving for the capital, and so the whole cycle repeats itself, like the life cycle of frogs.” – Patricio Pron, “A Few Words on the Life Cycle of Frogs” (trans. Janet Hendrickson)
“I no longer wanted to write; in fact, I didn’t even try. It was like I knew I’d wasted time at the station and the train had passed, and now I had to walk to the fucking end of the world, to arrive there with my feet destroyed and discover that everyone else had left a while back and they’d left the bill on the table without paying and a few dirty plates that I’d have to wash in the kitchen to cancel the bill.” – Patricio Pron, “A Few Words on the Life Cycle of Frogs” (trans. Janet Hendrickson)
“I have no qualifications in the career or, rather, pursuit I chose for my journey through life, and I’ve long ceased to think of it in those terms, although I suppose I got off to a pretty good start. In the end, though, I lost sight of my fellow runners, the ones you’re so conscience of at first, when you’re in your twenties or thirties and keep glancing out of the corner of your eye at those behind, intent (or so you believe) on overtaking you, meanwhile calculating how big a lead the runners ahead have over you and conserving your energies as you imagine the best way of getting past them for the final sprint. But there are no sprints, and certainly no final sprints. Indeed, I stopped running a long time ago. There’s no point. Just walk at the pace that suits your feet and you’ll end up arriving at the place you set out for. Or else keep quite still: lately, I’ve had the feeling that it’s simply a matter of sitting and waiting, that it isn’t us who do the walking, but the things around us, and they won’t fail us; they never do, because nothing ever fails and everything ends up happening anyway.” – Javier Montes, “The Hotel Life” (trans. Margaret Jull Costa)
“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.” – Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
“What a proletarian organ, the ass, the organ you sit on, and even though it seems to work and have working-class awareness, it’s really just waiting to die.” – Pola Oloixarac, “Conditions for the Revolution” (trans. Mara Faye Lethem)
“is it hard to be you? is it nice to be you? how does it feel to be you?” – Rodrigo Hasbún, “The Place of Losses” (trans. Carolina de Robertis)
“She had never had to deal with a policeman in her life, and it had never entered her mind to feel menaced by one. Policemen were neither friends nor enemies; they were part of the landscape, present for the purpose of upholding law and order; and if a policeman—for she had never thought of them as being very bright—seemed to forget his place, it was easy enough to make him remember it. Easy enough if one’s own place was more secure than his, and if one represented, or could bring to bear, a power greater than his own. For all policemen were bright enough to know who they were working for, and they were not working, anywhere in the world, for the powerless.” – James Baldwin, Another Country
“Don’t fear the dog that barks, but fear the dog that’s quiet.” – Anton Chekhov, “The Chattel” (trans. Constance Garnett)
“When women feel that they are in the right, they scold and shed tears; when they are conscious of being in fault, they shed tears only.” – Anton Chekhov, “The Chattel” (trans. Constance Garnett)
“French logic is very simple. Whatever the French do is logical because the French are doing it.” – James Baldwin, Another Country
“The trouble with a secret life is that it is very frequently a secret from the person who lives it and not at all a secret for the people he encounters. He encounters, because he must encounter, those people who see his secrecy before they see anything else, and who drag these secrets out of him; sometimes with the intention of using them against him, sometimes with more benevolent intent; but, whatever the intent, the moment is awful and the accumulating revelation is an unspeakable anguish. The aim of the dreamer, after all, is merely to go on dreaming and not to be molested by the world. His dreams are his protection against the world. But the aims of life are antithetical to those of the dreamer, and the teeth of the world are sharp.” – James Baldwin, Another Country (emphasis in original)
“Strangers’ faces hold no secrets because the imagination does not invest them with any. But the face of a lover is an unknown precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.” – James Baldwin, Another Country
“The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through. Most people had not lived—nor could it, for that matter, be said that they had died—through any of their terrible events. They had simply been stunned by the hammer. They passed their lives thereafter in a kind of limbo of denied and unexamined pain.” – James Baldwin, Another Country
“Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books; consequently, my belief in books had risen more out of a sense of desperation than from any abiding conviction of their ultimate value. . . . It had been my accidental reading of fiction and literary criticism that had evoked in me vague glimpses of life’s possibilities.” – Richard Wright, Black Boy
“If I were a member of the class that rules, I would post men in all the neighborhoods of the nation, not to spy upon or club rebellious workers, not to break strikes or disrupt unions; but to ferret out those who no longer respond to the system in which they live. I would make it known that the real danger does not stem from those who seek to grab their share of wealth through force, or from those who try to defend their property through violence, for both of those groups, by their affirmative acts, support the values of the system in which they live. The millions that I would fear are those who do not dream of the prizes that the nation holds forth, for it is in them, though they may not know it, that a revolution has taken place and is biding its time to translate itself into a new and strange way of life.” – Richard Wright, Black Boy
“Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness.” – Richard Wright, Black Boy
“Among the topics that southern white men did not like to discuss with Negroes were the following: American white women; the Ku Klux Klan; France, and how Negro soldiers fared while there; Frenchwomen; Jack Johnson; the entire northern part of the United States; the Civil War; Abraham Lincoln; U. S. Grant; General Sherman; Catholics; the Pope; Jews; the Republican party; slavery; social equality; Communism; Socialism; the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution; or any topic calling for positive knowledge or manly self-assertion on the part of the Negro.” – Richard Wright, Black Boy
“Mama says she named me by flipping open her English textbook to a random page and pointing. Angela, it said, like an angel. I know this story is fake, because if it were real, my name would be something like Fish or Lawyer.” – Angie Sijun Lou, All We Ask Is You to be Happy (emphasis in original)
“There is no known historical period when the Sahara has not been inhabited by man. Most of the other larger forms of animal life, whose abode it formerly was, have become extinct. If we believe the evidence of cave drawings, we can be sure that the giraffe, the hippopotamus and the rhinoceros were once dwellers in the region. The lion has disappeared from North Africa in our own time, likewise the ostrich. Now and then a crocodile is still discovered in some distant, hidden oasis pool, but the occurrence is so rare that when it happens it is a great event. The camel, of course, is not a native of Africa at all, but an importation from Asia, having arrived approximately at the time of the end of the Roman Empire—about when the last elephants were killed off. Large numbers of the herds of wild elephants that roamed the northern reaches of the desert were captured and trained for use in the Carthaginian army, but it was the Romans who finally annihilated the species to supply ivory for the European market.” – Paul Bowles, “Baptism of Solitude”
“Security is a false god; begin making sacrifices to it and you are lost.” – Paul Bowles, “Notes Mailed at Nagercoil”
“My father passed away and this is what I found myself remembering—not the things that were, but the things that were not: the places not visited, the words not said, the stories not shared.” – Olga Grushin, “Portrait of My Father”
“No one can hurt you the way a mother can. No one can love you the way a mother can.” – Kira Madden, “The Greeter”
“What ultimately lets us move on is not acceptance but boredom.” – Mary South, “The Promised Hostel”
“If life is occasionally interesting in anecdote, it’s not in the actual living.” – Mary South, “Architecture for Monsters”
“In order to be, one must not only be to one’s self: it is absolutely imperative that one be for others. One must have a way of basing one’s being on the certainty that others know one is there.” – Paul Bowles, “If I Should Open My Mouth” (emphasis in original)
“Why were machines ever invented? And what is this strange calm confidence that mankind has placed in these senseless toys it has managed to put together?” – Paul Bowles, “If I Should Open My Mouth”
“The Keiths are Keiths because they are not particularly handsome, not particularly intelligent, not particularly kind. A Keith would never train to compete in professional sports or practice an instrument until he became a maestro. Neither would a Keith jump in front of a loaded gun, but he would help you gather the contents of your grocery bag if you spilled it on the sidewalk. On a city bus, your gaze would pass pleasantly over a Keith as though over a stretch of ocean. There are warehouses of Stephanies, warehouses of Daniels, warehouses of Mayas, Georges, Crystals, Jamals, and Nicoles, but I am in Keiths. It’s always sad when one of your Keiths is harvested,” – Mary South, “Keith Prime”
“Material prosperity is necessary as a foundation for the highest intellectual effort.” – John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy