Postmodern authors

"¿Cómo reconocer una obra de arte? ¿Cómo separarla, aunque sólo sea un momento, de su aparato crítico, de sus exégetas, de sus incansables plagiarios, de sus ninguneadores, de su final destino de soledad? Es fácil. Hay que traducirla."

"Those in power (even if it's only for a little while) known nothing about literature, all they care about is power. And I'll play the fool for my readers, if I feel like it, but never for the powerful."

"If I were to say what I really think I would be arrested or shut away in a lunatic asylum. Come on, I am sure that it would be the same for everyone."

"Literature was a vast minefield occupied by enemies, except for a few classic authors (just a few), and every day I had to walk through that minefield, where any false move could be fatal, with only the poems of Archilochus to guide me. It's like that for all young writers. There comes a time when you have no support, not even from friends, forget about mentors, and there's no one to give you a hand; publication, prizes, and grants are reserved for the others, the ones who said “Yes, sir,” over and over, or those who praised the literary mandarins, a never-ending horde distinguished only by their aptitude for discipline and punishment — nothing escapes them and they forgive nothing."

"The secret story is the one we'll never know, although we're living it from day to day, thinking we're alive, thinking we've got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn't matter. But every single damn thing matters! Only we don't realize. We just tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another, and we don't realize that's a lie."

"We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain."

"It's strange how things happen, Mauricio Silva, known as the Eye, always tried to escape from violence even at the risk of being considered a coward, but the violence, the real violence, can't be escaped, at least not by us, born in Latin America in the 1950s, those of us who were around twenty years old when Salvador Allende died."

"One day I heard that The Eye had left Mexico. I wasn't surprised that he hadn't said good-bye. The Eye never said good-bye to anyone. I never said good-bye to anyone either."

"That night when he went back to his hotel, he wept for his dead children and all the other castrated boys, for his own lost youth, for those who were young no longer and those who died young, for those who fought for Salvador Allende and those who were too scared to fight."

"I was imprisoned in Concepción for a few days and then realeased. They didn't torture me, as I had feared; they didn't even rob me. But they didn't give me anything to eat either, or any kind of covering for the night, so I had to rely on the goodwill of other prisoners, who shared their food with me. In the small hours I could hear them torturing others; I couldn't sleep and there was nothing to read except a magazine in English that someone had left behind. The only interesting article in it was about a house that had once belonged to Dylan Thomas. ... I got out of that hole thanks to a pair of detectives who had been at high school with me in Los Ángeles..."

"La literatura es un vasto bosque y las obras maestras son los lagos, los árboles inmensos o extrañísimos, las elocuentes flores preciosas o las escondidas grutas, pero un bosque también está compuesto por árboles comunes y corrientes, por yerbazales, por charcos, por plantas parásitas, por hongos y por florecillas silvestres."

"About happiness he said not a word, I suppose because he considered it something strictly private and perhaps, how shall I say, treacherous or elusive."

"Darling, Juan de Dios Martínez would say to her sometimes, sweetheart, love, and in the darkness she would tell him to be quiet and then suck every last drop from him- of semen? of his soul? of the little life he felt, at the time, remained to him? They made love, at her express request, in semidarkness."

"He began to think about semblance, as Ansky had discussed it in his notebook, and he began to think about himself. He felt free, as he never had in his life, and although malnourished and weak, he also felt the strength to prolong as far as possible this impulse toward freedom, toward sovereignty. And yet the possibility that it was all nothing but semblance troubled him. Semblance was an occupying force of reality, he said to himself, even the most extreme, borderline reality. It lived in people's souls and their actions, in willpower and in pain, in the way memories and priorities were ordered. Semblance proliferated in the salons of the industrialists and in the underworld. It set the rules, it rebelled against its own rules...it set new rules."

"More recent writers who have knocked me dead include Roberto Bolaño, Ruth Ozeki, Sabrina Vourvoulias, Isabel Quintero and N. K. Jemisin."

"Among the many acid pleasures of the work of Roberto Bolaño, who died at 50 in 2003, is his idea that culture, in particular literary culture, is a whore. In the face of political repression, upheaval and danger, writers continue to swoon over the written word, and this, for Bolaño, is the source both of nobility and of pitch-black humor. In his novel The Savage Detectives, two avid young Latino poets never lose faith in their rarefied art no matter the vicissitudes of life, age and politics. If they are sometimes ridiculous, they are always heroic. But what can it mean, he asks us and himself, in his dark, extraordinary, stinging novella By Night in Chile, that the intellectual elite can write poetry, paint and discuss the finer points of avant-garde theater as the junta tortures people in basements? The word has no national loyalty, no fundamental political bent; it's a genie that can be summoned by any would-be master. Part of Bolaño's genius is to ask, via ironies so sharp you can cut your hands on his pages, if we perhaps find a too-easy comfort in art, if we use it as anesthetic, excuse and hide-out in a world that is very busy doing very real things to very real human beings. Is it courageous to read Plato during a military coup or is it something else?"

"Who said literature has no real power to affect history? Not Bolaño — for him, literature is an unnervingly protean, amoral force with uncanny powers of self-invention, self-justification and self-mythification. The mythmakers, he suggests, certainly do matter."

"I still don’t want to accept that W. G. Sebald and Roberto Bolaño, working only yesterday, are gone today. They each published for only a decade before dying in their fifties, but not before expanding our idea of what a novel can be. Half of what’s published these days bears their marks, and so it’s impossible for me to think of writers working today without thinking first of them."

"The moment we "discover" a favorite writer is like our experience of a cataclysmic event — we can remember precisely where we were and what we were doing when it occurred... So I assume I'll always recall the doctor's waiting room where I opened a dimpled, out-of-date issue of The New Yorker and found Roberto Bolaño's story "Gómez Palacio." For the first time, I was glad the doctor was running late, so I could read the story twice, and still have a few minutes left over to consider the fact that I had just encountered something extraordinarily beautiful and (at least to me) entirely new."

"Reading Roberto Bolaño is like hearing the secret story, being shown the fabric of the particular, watching the tracks of art and life merge at the horizon and linger there like a dream from which we awake inspired to look more attentively at the world."

"Bolaño's narrative style is fragmented and loaded. It is also full of a strange kind of gallows humour, as we are swept along by stories that are invented and presented entirely convincingly, only to be suddenly brought up short by a reminder that this has not been done innocently."

"Bolaño has a laser eye and a frank, confessional first-person voice as relentless as it is irresistible. His "infra-realism" sears through the book's world-weary characters... Just behind the nervy, deadpan narrative a total breakdown perpetually looms... Bolaño's writing... is an incantation — against horror, against defeat, against oblivion..."

"By far the most inspiring talent from south of the border since the '70s. A Chilean who lived for years in Mexico and ultimately settled near Barcelona before he died in 2003 at age 50, Bolaño's oeuvre is slowly making its way into English... His hypnotizing style and restless approach to plot are at once refreshing and humbling."

"'Andábamos sin buscarnos pero sabiendo que andábamos para encontrarnos.'"

"I touch your mouth, I touch the edge of your mouth with my finger, I am drawing it as if it were something my hand was sketching, as if for the first time your mouth opened a little, and all I have to do is close my eyes to erase it and start all over again, every time I can make the mouth I want appear, the mouth which my hand chooses and sketches on your face, and which by some chance that I do not seek to understand coincides exactly with your mouth which smiles beneath the one my hand is sketching on you."

"Nada está perdido si se tiene el valor de proclamar que todo está perdido y hay que empezar de nuevo."

"'Ahora pasa que las tortugas son grandes admiradoras de la velocidad, como es natural. Las esperanzas lo saben, y no se preocupan. Los famas lo saben, y se burlan. Los cronopios lo saben, y cada vez que encuentran una tortuga, sacan la caja de tizas de colores y sobre la redonda pizarra de la tortuga dibujan una golondrina.'"

""Hair loss and retrieval" (Translation of "Pérdida y recuperación del pelo")"

"The snail lives the way I like to live; he carries his own home with him."

"The only true exile is the writer who lives in his own country."

"For the majority of readers, Latin American fantastic literature operates under the tutelage of the great masters: Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez. However, although few are acquainted with their works, many women began experimenting with this genre well before their male counterparts and were the true precursors of the form, though their names remained on the shelves of oblivion, without the recognition that they deserved. María Luisa Bombal, for example, wrote the fantastic nouvelle, House of Mist (1937) before the famous Ficciones (1944) of Borges, and the Mexican, Elena Garro, wrote Remembrance of Things to Come (1962) before the publication of García Márquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)."

"Julio was never a regional writer. You could see he was Argentinian, but he was more like Borges, more universal from the very beginning. He didn’t jump from the regionalism, he wrote universally all the time...It’s not that Julio was not very Argentinian, he was very Argentinian but his works were never as local."

"I belong to the first generation of Latin American writers brought up reading other Latin American writers. Before my time the work of Latin American writers was not well distributed, even on our continent. In Chile it was very hard to read other writers from Latin America. My greatest influences have been all the great writers of the Latin American Boom in literature: García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Cortázar, Borges, Paz, Rulfo, Amado, etc."

"I was influenced by all of them-by García Márquez, by Carlos Fuentes, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, José Donoso, so many of them-some of my own generation, like Eduardo Galeano. It's easy for me to write because I don't have to invent anything. They already found a voice, a way of telling us to ourselves, so it's easy."

"I have a commitment to many of my major characters who have brown skin. That's a commitment to the story of a different character that you're not used to seeing in literature. In Julio Cortázar's work, for example, I can deal with his Latin American history, I can deal with the language, but his women have white, porcelain skin. They're Argentine, probably from a European background."

"One of the first people I read was García Márquez and One Hundred Years of Solitude when I was about nineteen or eighteen. And Julio Cortázar. I read all of Jorge Amado. I can tell you I read everybody and everything. And they would drive me nuts! But I was compelled to it. I was driven to the mechanics of what they were doing...I read and reread Julio Cortázar to try to learn from the writer the labyrinth of his style...I think he is one of the best examples of playing with time. When I was going to write The Mixquiahuala Letters I was twenty-three, and I had this idea about playing with time-that time was fluid-and I mentioned this project to a friend of mine, who was getting his Master's in Spanish literature, and he said that's already been done!"

"Cortázar…whom I admire deeply, I met much later in my life...Cortázar is the one who is closest to my way of understanding the act of writing. And nearer to my heart. I admire Carlos Fuentes on the opposite extreme of the equation. That is why I wrote a book on both of them, Entrecruzamientos: Cortázar/Fuentes."

"Cualquiera que no lea a Cortázar está condenado. No leerlo es una seria enfermedad invisible que, con el tiempo, puede traer consecuencias terribles. Semejante en cierto modo al que nunca ha saboreado un durazno, el hombre se volverá calladamente más triste, notablemente más pálido y es probable que, poco a poco, acabe perdiendo todo el pelo."

"For a Westerner to trash Western culture is like criticizing our nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere on the grounds that it sometimes gets windy, and besides, Jupiter's is much prettier. You may not realize its advantages until you're trying to breathe liquid methane."

"I think visual literacy and media literacy is not without value, but I think plain old-fashioned text literacy and mathematical literacy are much more powerful and flexible ways to organize your mind."

"The science fiction approach doesn't mean it's always about the future; it's an awareness that this is different."

"I can never get past the structural similarities between the Singularity prediction and the apocalypse of St. John the Divine. The key thing they have in common is the idea of a rapture, in which some chosen humans will be taken up and made one with the infinite while others will be left behind...[loosely paraphrasing Jaron Lanier] while hardware might be getting faster all the time, software is shit. And without software to do something useful with all that hardware, the hardware's nothing more than a really complicated space heater."

"Slashdot reader: In a fight between you and William Gibson, who would win? Stephenson: You don't have to settle for mere idle speculation...The first time was a year or two after Snow Crash came out. I was doing a reading/signing at White Dwarf Books in Vancouver. Gibson stopped by to say hello and extended his hand as if to shake...I grabbed the signing table and flipped it up between us...The falling table knocked over a space heater and set fire to the store. Gibson and I dueled among blazing stacks of books for a while...The second time, when Gibson came through Seattle on his Idoru tour, he devastated my quarter of the city...As a stalemate developed we began to resort more and more to the use of pure energy, modulated by Red Lotus incantations of the third Sung group..."

"I dreamed up the Snow Crash world 15 years ago as a thought experiment, and I tweaked it to be as funny and outrageous and graphic novel like as I could make it. Such a world wouldn't be stable unless each little "burbclave" had the ability to defend itself from all external threats. This is not plausible, barring some huge advances in defensive technology."

"So I'm well aware that there are certain people frustrated with the endings of my books. I can remember at the time I was writing it, I told a friend of mine that the climax of Snow Crash was now longer than Moby-Dick: There's a helicopter that gets brought down; there's a private jet that blows up; some people die; there's confrontation and a girl goes home with her mom — so it seems like a good ending to me. [audience laughter] Once you write a book or two with controversial endings — and that meme gets going, of “Stephenson can’t write endings” — then that gets slapped on everything that you do no matter how elaborate the ending is. I think Anathem does OK on that score. I'm sure that I'll be hearing from some of the “Stephenson can’t write endings” people, but I think that it has a decent enough ending."

"As far as culture and politics are concerned, the important theme is long-attention-span vs. short-attention-span thinking. I'm sure that your readers can think of any number of ways in which having a longer attention span can be useful. But I'll name one. Bankers with long attention spans don't lend money to people who can't pay it back. If we had more bankers who adopted a long-term view of their responsibilities, we might not be in the middle of a financial crisis that is blowing away 150-year-old investment banks."

"Any strategy that involves crossing a valley—accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance—will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure. In short, a world where big stuff can never get done."

"I wanted to create an interesting scifi universe that didn't violate the laws of physics, and that means that you're limited to staying inside the solar system. I also wanted to get away from the ship-centric style of science fiction. Star Trek is ship-centric and it's all about the Enterprise — there are many other examples. What if we decided to get away from the obsession with ships and instead thought about big machines and structures that might be used to create a civilization inside the solar system?"

"Now, at the little southern black college where I went to school, we had no megadorms. We were cool at the right times and academic at the right times .... Boston University, where I did my Master's ... most students had no time for sonic war, and the rest vented their humors in the city, not in the dorms. Ohio State was nicely spread out, and I lived in an apartment complex where noisy shit-for-brains undergrads were even less welcome than tweedy black bachelors."

"This is a history, in that it intends to describe what happened and suggest why. ... I may have fooled around with a few facts. But I served as witness until as close to the end as anyone could have ... and so there is not so much art in this as to make it irrelevant."

"What you are about to read is not an aberration: it can happen in your local university too. The Big U, simply, was a few years ahead of the rest."

"What people do isn't determined by where they live. It happens to be their damned fault. They decided to watch TV instead of thinking when they were in high school. They decided to blow-off courses and drink beer instead of reading and trying to learn something. They decided to chicken out and be intolerant bastards instead of being openminded and, finally, they decided to go along with their buddies and do things that were terribly wrong when there was no reason they had to. Anyone who hurts someone else decides to hurt them, goes out of their way to do it.... The fact that it's hard to be a good person doesn't excuse going along and being an asshole. If they can't overcome their own fear of being unusual, it's not my fault, because any idiot ought to be able to see that if he just acts reasonably and makes a point of not hurting others, he'll be happier."

"“Sangamon’s Principle,” I said. “The simpler the molecule, the better the drug. So the best drug is oxygen. Only two atoms. The second-best, nitrous oxide—a mere three atoms. The third-best, ethanol—nine. Past that, you’re talking lots of atoms.” “So?” “Atoms are like people. Get lots of them together, never know what they’ll do.”"

"I’m not that proud of being a congenital pain in the ass. But I will take money for it."

"One of the problems, hanging out with me, is that I can turn any topic into a toxic horror story. I've lost two girlfriends and a job by reading an ingredients label out loud, with annotations, at the wrong time."

"And I hadn't even told him the truth. Actually, the shit coming out of Basco's pipes was a hundred thousand times more concentrated than was legally allowed.... That kind of thing goes on all the time. But no matter how many diplomas are tacked to your wall, give people a figure like that and they'll pass you off as a flake. You can't get most people to believe how wildly the eco-laws get broken, but if I say "More than twice the legal limit," they get comfortably outraged."

"The corporations have already planted their own bombs. All we have to do is light the fuses."

"It's the ultimate Boston transportation. On land there's the Omni, but all those slow cars get in the way. There's public transit – the T — but if you're in good shape, it's usually faster to walk. Bicycles aren't bad. But on water, nothing stops you and there isn't anything important in Boston that isn't within two blocks of being wet. The Harbor and the city are interlocked like wrestling squid, tentacles of water and land snaking off everywhere, slashed with bridges or canals."

"At some point I was entitled to say that I had entered Boston Harbor, the toilet of the Northeast. By shoving the motor over to one side I could spin the Zode in tight rings and look up into the many shit-greased sphincters of the Fair Lady on the Hill, Hub of the Universe, Cradle of Crap, my hometown."

"In four years of work, I've idled my Zodiac down every one of its thousands of inlets, looked at every inch of its fractal coastline and found every single goddamned pipe that empties into it. Some of the pipes are big enough to park a car in and some are the size of your finger, but all of them have told their story to my gas chromatograph. And often it's the littlest pipes that cause the most damage. When I see a big huge pipe coming right out of a factory, I'm betting the pumpers have at least read the EPA regs. But when I find a tiny one, hidden below the waterline, sprouting from a mile-wide industrial carnival, I put on gloves before taking my sample. And sometimes the gloves melt."

"Jim and his crew of a dozen or so specialize in loud, sloppy publicity seeking.... Myself, I like the stiletto-in-the-night approach. That's partly because I'm younger, a post-Sixties type, and partly because my thing is toxics, not nukes or mammals....there are all kinds of direct, simple ways to go after toxic criminals. You just plug the pipes."

"The big lie of American capitalism is that corporations work in their own best interests. In fact they’re constantly doing things that will eventually bring them to their knees. Most of these blunders involve toxic chemicals that any competent chemist should know to be dangerous. They pump these things into the environment and don’t even try to protect themselves. The evidence is right there in public, almost as if they’d printed up signed confessions and sprinkled them out of airplanes. Sooner or later, someone shows up in a Zodiac and points to that evidence, and the result is devastation far worse than what a terrorist, a Boone, could manage with bombs and guns. All the old men within twenty miles who have come down with tumors become implacable enemies. All the women married to them, all the mothers of damaged children, and even those of undamaged ones. The politicians and the news media trample each other in their haste to pour hellfire down on that corporation. The transformation can happen overnight and it’s easy to bring about. You just have to show up and point your finger."

"I don’t mean the EPA, the chemical Keystone Kops. Offices full of mediocre chemists, led by the lowest bottom-feeders of all: political appointees. Expecting them to do anything controversial is like expecting a hay fever sufferer to harvest a field of ragweed. For God’s sake, they wouldn’t even admit that chlordane was dangerous. And if they don’t have the balls to take preventative measures, punitive action doesn’t even enter their minds. The laws are broken so universally that they don’t know what to do. They don’t even look for violators."

"Nothing in a hardware store ever gets bought for its nominal purpose. You buy something that was designed to do one thing, and you use it for another."

"Any property that's open to common use gets destroyed. Because everyone has incentive to use it to the max, but no one has incentive to maintain it. Like the water and the air. These guys have incentive to pollute the ocean, but no reason to clean it up."

"Every large corporation has its own telephone maze, its juicy numbers and dead ends, its nickel-plated bitch queens and sugary do-gooders."

"He wanted Justice and I wanted a beer."

"Talking to cancer victims never makes me feel righteous, never vindicated. It makes me slightly ill and for some reason, guilty. If people like me would just keep our mouths shut, people like him would never suspect why they got cancer. They'd chalk it up to God or probability. They wouldn't die with hearts full of venom. It is a strange world that Industry has made. Kind of a seething toxic harbor, opening out on a blue unspoiled ocean. Most people are swimming in it, and I get to float around on the surface, on my Zodiac, announcing that they're in trouble. What I really want to do is make a difference. But I'm not sure I have, yet."

"It might interest you to know that our state is tired of being used as a chemical toilet so that people in Utah can have plastic lawn furniture." "I can't believe an assistant attorney general came right out and said that." "Well, I wouldn't say it in public."

"I was happy to avoid them. They wore the uniform of the teen nonconformist: long hair, unsuccessful mustache, black leather."

"Bartholomew was a sommelier of heavy metal. “Yeah. Not bad for a two-umlaut band. First album was so-so. Then they ran out of material—they write maybe two songs a year. Got into a black magic thing for their videos. Already passé.” “Isn’t that the whole point of heavy metal?” “Yeah. I’m the one who told you that,” he reminded me. “Heavy metal will never leave you behind.”"

"If you’re an engineer, and you’re not very bright, it’s easy to love polychlorinated biphenyls."

"[I] followed him past all the smiling secretaries, the cheery bottle-washer pushing a cartload of glassware, the unresponsive Xerox repairman, the hale-and-hearty fellow executives, blah blah blah. Being in an office just makes my skin crawl. All that good cheer. All that fine wool, the processed air, the mediocre coffee, fluorescent tubes, lipstick, new-carpet smell, the same fucking xeroxed cartoons tacked on the walls. I wanted to shout: one Far Side on the door does not an interesting person make."

"He had a sense of irony that ruled his life, made it impossible for him to use his considerable brains in any kind of serious job. Kind of like me."

"There was a white man sitting at the kitchen table, warming his hands by wrapping them around a hot cup of tea. He had kind of an oblong face, curly red hair piled on top, a close-cropped but dense red beard, shocking blue eyes that always looked wide open. He face was ruddy with the outdoors, and the way he was sitting there with that tea, he looked so calm, so centered, almost like he was in meditation. When I came in, he looked at me and smiled just a trace, without showing his teeth and I nodded back."

"“Those guys are troglodytes,” he said, “Their solution to everything is a high-powered rifle.”"

"“I always wanted to be a Secret Service agent,” he confessed. “Because then you’re the only person in the world who can knock down the president and get away with it.”"

"Heavy metal, drugs and sexual passion had dissolved her brain to a certain point where she no longer distinguished between dead and living persons."

"A good yuppie has no sense of smell."

"Everything that has occurred in Silicon Valley in the last couple of decades also occurred in the 1850s. Anyone who thinks that wild-ass high tech venture capitalism is a late-20th-century California phenomenon needs to read about the maniacs who built the first transatlantic cable projects. The only things that have changed since then are that the stakes have gotten smaller, the process more bureaucratized, and the personalities less interesting."

"Both Penang and the Internet were established basically for strategic military reasons. In both cases, what was built by the military was merely a kernel for a much vaster phenomenon that came along later. This kernel was really nothing more than a protocol, a set of rules. If you wanted to follow those rules, you could participate, otherwise you were free to go elsewhere. Because the protocol laid down a standard way for people to interact, which was clearly set out and could be understood by anyone, it attracted smart, adaptable, ambitious people from all over the place, and at a certain point it flew completely out of control and turned into something that no one had ever envisioned: something thriving, colorful, wildly diverse, essentially peaceful, and plagued only by the congestion of its own success."

"Both [Penang and the Internet] have seen many young Western men arrive here on business missions and completely lose control of their sphincters and become impediments to any kind of organized activity. Daily hired Wall because, like Daily, he is a stable family man who has his act together...and they seem to be making excellent progress toward their goal, which is to run two really expensive wires across the Malay Peninsula. They tend to be absolutely straight shooters.... Their openness would probably be career suicide in the atmosphere of Byzantine court-eunuch intrigue that is public life in the United States today. On the other hand, if I had an unlimited amount of money and woke up tomorrow morning with a burning desire to see a 2,000-hole golf course erected on the surface of Mars, I would probably call men like Daily and Wall, do a handshake deal with them, send them a blank check, and not worry about it."

"The world has actually been wired together by digital communications systems for a century and a half. Nothing that has happened during that time compares in its impact to the first exchange of messages between Queen Victoria and President Buchanan in 1858. That was so impressive that a mob of celebrants poured into the streets of New York and set fire to City Hall."

"The Victorian era was an age of superlatives and larger-than-life characters, and as far as that goes, Dr. Wildman Whitehouse fit right in: what Victoria was to monarchs, Dickens to novelists...Dr. Wildman Whitehouse was to assholes."

"Whitehouse disappeared into ignominy. William Thomson ended up being knighted and later elevated to a baron by Queen Victoria. He became Lord Kelvin and eventually got an important unit of measurement, an even more important law of physics, and a refrigerator named after him."

"To the hacker, the most interesting thing about the pyramids is their business plan, which is the simplest and most effective ever devised: 1. Put a rock on top of another rock. 2. Repeat (1) until gawkers arrive. 3. Separate them from their valuables by all conceivable means."

"Hostility towards Microsoft is not difficult to find on the Net, and it blends two strains: resentful people who feel Microsoft is too powerful, and disdainful people who think it's tacky. This is all strongly reminiscent of the heyday of Communism and Socialism, when the bourgeoisie were hated from both ends: by the proles, because they had all the money, and by the intelligentsia, because of their tendency to spend it on lawn ornaments. Microsoft is the very embodiment of modern high-tech prosperity — it is, in a word, bourgeois — and so it attracts all of the same gripes."

"It is a bit unsettling, at first, to think of Apple as a control freak, because it is completely at odds with their corporate image. Weren't these the guys who aired the famous Super Bowl ads showing suited, blindfolded executives marching like lemmings off a cliff? Isn't this the company that even now runs ads picturing the Dalai Lama (except in Hong Kong) and Einstein and other offbeat rebels? It is indeed the same company, and the fact that they have been able to plant this image of themselves as creative and rebellious free-thinkers in the minds of so many intelligent and media-hardened skeptics really gives one pause. It is testimony to the insidious power of expensive slick ad campaigns and, perhaps, to a certain amount of wishful thinking in the minds of people who fall for them. It also raises the question of why Microsoft is so bad at PR, when the history of Apple demonstrates that, by writing large checks to good ad agencies, you can plant a corporate image in the minds of intelligent people that is completely at odds with reality."

"In your high school geology class you probably were taught that all life on earth exists in a paper-thin shell called the biosphere, which is trapped between thousands of miles of dead rock underfoot, and cold dead radioactive empty space above. Companies that sell OSes exist in a sort of technosphere. Underneath is technology that has already become free. Above is technology that has yet to be developed, or that is too crazy and speculative to be productized just yet. Like the Earth's biosphere, the technosphere is very thin compared to what is above and what is below."

"These changes in identity and location can easily become nested inside each other, many layers deep, even if you aren't doing anything nefarious. Once you have forgotten who and where you are, the whoami command is indispensable."

"Windows 95 and MacOS are products, contrived by engineers in the service of specific companies. Unix, by contrast, is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic."

"I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. It was created by Richard Stallman; enough said. It is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful. It is colossal, and yet it only edits straight ASCII text files, which is to say, no fonts, no boldface, no underlining. In other words, the engineer-hours that, in the case of Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and the ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in the case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text."

"The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason. It was waxing, only one day short of full. The time was 05:03:12 UTC. Later it would be designated A+0.0.0, or simply Zero. An amateur astronomer in Utah was the first person on Earth to realize that something unusual was happening. Moments earlier, he had noticed a blur flourishing in the vicinity of the Reiner Gamma formation, near the moon's equator. He assumed it was a dust cloud thrown up by a meteor strike. He pulled out his phone and blogged the event."

"She had grown tired of the pouffy floating hair of zero gravity and, after a few weeks of clamping it down with baseball caps, had figured out how to make this shorter cut work for her. The haircut had spawned terabytes of Internet commentary from men, and a few women, who apparently had nothing else to do with their time."

"The evening went fine. Doob, who had raised three children to adulthood, had figured out a long time ago that any event largely organized by elementary school teachers was likely to come off extremely well from a logistical and crowd-control standpoint."

"“Dinah,” Sparky said, “you’re indispensable.” She knew exactly what this meant, in meeting-speak: they would put her out the airlock if they could."

"Most of the people on the Cloud Ark were going to have to be women. There were other reasons for it besides just making more babies. Research on the long-term effects of spaceflight suggested that women were less susceptible to radiation damage than men. They were smaller on average, requiring less space, less food, less air. And sociological studies pointed to the idea that they did better when crammed together in tight spaces for long periods of time. This was controversial, as it got into fraught topics of nature vs. nurture and whether gender identity was a social construct or a genetic program. But if you bought into the idea that boys had been programmed by Darwinian selection to run around in the open chucking spears at wild animals—something that every parent who had ever raised a boy had to take seriously—then it was difficult to envision a lot of them spending their lives in tin cans."

"“We live in strange times. I’m fertile right now. I can tell. No more condoms for you, tiger."...He was already thinking about the videos he was going to make to teach his baby about calculus when he climaxed."

"So in order to accommodate the Pioneers who would begin arriving in a few weeks, the Arkitects sent up Scouts. The qualifications for being a Scout seemed to be a shocking level of physical endurance, a complete disregard for mortal danger, and some knowledge of how to exist in a space suit. All of them were Russian."

"Every parent of a teenager gets used to it: the moment in a child's life when he or she decides that certain facts are just too much trouble to explain to Mom or Dad. The parents can't, and needn't, know every last little thing. They just have to accept this, be content with what they can glean on their own, and move on."

"[Luisa] knew how to use her own ignorance as an icebreaker in conversations. Izzy was full of people who were skewed toward the Asperger’s end of the social spectrum, and there was no better way to get them to start talking than to ask them a technical question."

"You could get use to anything. You got used to it and then time raced by, and before you knew it, time was up."

"It was difficult to sustain the illusion that education was of value for kids who would not live long enough to use it. They'd never take the standardized tests that they were prepping for. In a way, Amelia had said, this had led to a kind of renaissance in pedagogy. Free from the constraints of racking up high test scores or getting into colleges, students could learn for learning's sake—which was how it ought to be. The tick-tock curriculum had dissolved and been replaced by activities improvised from day to day by teachers and parents: hiking in the mountains, doing art projects about the Cloud Ark, talking with psychologists about death, reading favorite books. In one sense Amelia and her colleagues had never been more needed, never had such an opportunity to show their quality."

"“Politics,” Doob sighed. Luisa chuckled. “I hear you, sugar. I’m not gonna say you’re wrong. But I have to warn you that this is the word—‘politics’—that nerds use whenever they feel impatient about the human realities of an organization.”"

"His earlier conversation with Luisa had brought home to him, however, that ignoring politics might not be the wisest long-term strategy. He might not care about politics, but politics cared about him."

"When he tried to filter out that bias and to look at the models and the data in a completely objective way, he concluded that the jury was still out. So, technical discussions of the matter tended to be unproductive, except insofar as they revealed the biases that the participants had brought into the room with them. And here was where it started to get difficult for him personally, because he couldn't understand why anyone would harbor a bias different from his own."

"Hotness was a part of the human condition and it was pointless to pretend that it did not exist."

"We did not expect to have a backup system for the rest of the universe. We can rely upon it to be cold most of the time."

"The little boy in him was crestfallen that he wasn't going on the adventure. Then he reminded himself that he was already part of the biggest adventure ever, and that, so far, it had been altogether miserable."

"We can't run this experiment a thousand times to see the range of different outcomes. We can only run it once. The human mind has trouble with situations like that. We see patterns where they don't exist, we find meaning in randomness."

"Trying to, you know, persuade others to join our side. Trying to make the other side look bad. Just like the Internet always was."

"“We can’t make the same mistake again,” Aïda said, “of fooling ourselves. Believing in shit that isn’t real.”"

"There is a process known as parthenogenesis, literally virgin birth, by which a uniparental embryo can be created out of a normal egg. It's been done with animals. The only reason no one ever did it with humans is because it seemed ethically dodgy, as well as completely unnecessary given the willingness of men to impregnate women every chance they got."

"“We need brains, is the bottom line,” Ivy said. “We’re not hunter-gatherers anymore. We’re all living like patients in the intensive care unit of a hospital. What keeps us alive isn’t bravery, or athleticism, or any of those other skills that were valuable in a caveman society. It’s our ability to master complex technological skills. It is our ability to be nerds. We need to breed nerds.”"

"I have been clinically depressed for most of my life. I once used drugs to fix it. Then I stopped. I stopped because I decided they were making me stupid, and I'd rather be miserable than stupid. I am what I am."

"Kath Two was the sort of person whose caches were apt to be crammed with paper books. For her, the electronic books were an insurance policy of sorts. The four-day elevator ride might be nothing more than a prelude to further journeys, some of which might take her to places with little to no bandwidth, and nothing was worse than getting stuck in a situation like that with nothing to read."

"“I hope that this assignment will not prove an inconvenience,” Doc continued. “All duty is inconvenient to a greater or lesser degree, or it would not be duty.”"

"If history was any guide, those best at violence might end up ruling over everyone else."

"He had had many conversations during his long life. Some were fascinating and stayed with him more than a century later. Others were less so. As a younger man he had tolerated those as part of the cost of doing business—a sort of tax that all people must pay in order to take part in civilized society. When he had turned one hundred, he had decided to stop paying that tax. Henceforth he would engage only in conversations that really interested him—which, with a few exceptions for close friends and family members, meant conversations with a purpose."

"As it turned out, imagining the fate of seven billion people was far less emotionally affecting than imagining the fate of one."

"It is only a certain type of mind that scorns what is known by all and treats secrets as jewels."

"The mere suggestion that it might be possible to look at a thing from more than one point of view was infuriating to these people."

"“If you show her too much favor she will be punished. If you touch her, we’re all dead,” Ty said. “Why?” Einstein asked. “Because this is one of those cultures that is psychotic about female reproductive organs.”"

"“If you are going to make first contact with an intelligent alien race,” said Cantabrigia Five, “dropping huge strip-mining robots into their homeland might not be your best move.”"

"“People who claim they are motivated by the Purpose end up behaving differently—and generally better—than people who serve other masters.” “So it is like believing in God.” “Maybe yes. But without the theology, the scripture, the pigheaded certainty.”"

"My name is Melisande Stokes and this is my story. I am writing in July 1851 (Common Era, or—let's face it—Anno Domini)...London, England. But I am not a native of this place or time. In fact, I am quite desperate to get out of here...when I'm done writing this Diachronicle, I am going to take it to the very discreet private offices of the Fugger Bank...not to be opened for more than one hundred and sixty years. The Fuggers, above all people in this world, understand the dangers of Diachronic Shear."

"I'm writing with a steel-nibbed dip pen...partly so that I could jab my thumb with it and draw blood. The brown smear across the top of this page can be tested in any twenty-first-century DNA lab...and you will know that I am a woman of your era, writing in the middle of the nineteenth century... To quote Peter Gabriel, a singer/songwriter who will be born ninety-nine years from now: This will be my testimony."

"Reader, if you don't know what a database is, rest assured that an explanation of the concept would in no way increase your enjoyment in reading this account. If you do know, you will thank me for sparing you the details."

"Young, lavishly bearded tech entrepreneurs were trudging forlornly down the hallways, laden with computers, printers, high-end coffeemakers, and foosball tables. Like digital Okies they loaded their stuff into their Scions or Ryder trucks and rumbled off into the unforgiving Boston commercial real estate market. “So you’re going to, uh, remove basically the entire floor of the conference room?” “The conference room will cease to exist. DODO is not about meetings. Not about PowerPoints.” “I never imagined otherwise.”"

"“I made it into Wikipedia,” sang Erszebet. “I’ll bet none of my enemies ever made it into Wikipedia.”"

"The next station was called simply TRAPEZOID, but I could have guessed as much from the fact that more than half the people getting on and off the train were dressed in military uniforms of one service or another...As the headquarters of the American military and presumed ground zero for any hostile military strike, the Trapezoid had, for me, always been more mythic than real...The terrorists had targeted it on 9/11, and I could see part of the memorial that had been built on the side where the plane had crashed into it."

"I began to dig into the history of the Fuggers. This was the third time in the short history of DODO that the name had unexpectedly come up. And even though they were a famous old banking family, this seemed like too many coincidences... Even with the combined resources of Harvard's library system and U.S. intelligence databases, I wasn't able to find much. The medieval part of the story has been common knowledge for centuries...In 1459 the family had produced Jacob, the seventh surviving child in a large brood...who had, to make a long story short, become the richest person in the world... By 1601 the last central authority had been Markus Fugger: a patron of arts, a history buff, a collector of old artifacts, an ancient-languages geek... [1640] Athanasius Fugger was completely absent from the historical record."

"I tried working from the other direction, getting what information I could about the modern-day organization, and working backwards. But they were discreet to the point of paranoia, running their business through a network of offshore companies registered in places like the Cayman Islands, Jersey, and the Isle of Man. They only allowed the Fugger name to break the surface when it was to their tactical advantage, as when trying to hire employees for of their humanitarian NGOs."

"In layperson's terms: if it has to be dunked in liquid helium to work, I don't understand it. If it's in a rack with fans blowing on it, that's a different story."

"IF YOU ARE ABOUT TO BE IN A SWORDFIGHT This comes up a lot and I am working on upgrading the relevant wiki pages, but people seem to end up here anyway LOL. My basic advice: DON'T DO IT! It is ridiculously, fantastically dangerous. Modern people are calibrated for a whole different level of danger acceptance."

"Most of them don't actually care who wins because they understand it's just about who sits on the throne, they know the Crusaders aren't here to try to actually harm the city itself. All the potential emperors are assholes, and they're all related to each other, it hardly matters which one wins. So the citizens are literally picnicking and placing bets on who wins the day."

"USSS 1: I am beginning to get concerned messages from people in the Pentagon wanting to know why Backhoe is incommunicado. DOSECOPS C4: The Pentagon? USSS 1: The Trapezoid. Was my transmission garbled? DOSECOPS C4: Sorry, I was distracted. I thought you said Pentagon. USSS 1: I'm a little foggy myself with all of the weirdness around here and I may have said the wrong thing. I am referring to the [GARBLED]. The very large building across the Potomac River from DC that is the headquarters of the United States military. Does that help clarify matters? DOSECOPS C4: Sure. The Pentagon. USSS 1: That's what I'm saying!"

"BOG Container Lines Inc. is the survival into modern times of Bunch of Grapes, which is an extremely old presence in the shipping industry. I mean, it's named after a tavern in Boston from the 1600s that was named after a tavern in London that dates back to at least the 1200s...I'm still waiting for some query results to come back so that we can discover their inevitable connection to the Fuggers. I don't even know why I bother."

"To help the reader calibrate the level of weird that's going on, I believe that the building we all know as the Pentagon was called the Trapezoid when it was first built...It only became the Pentagon a few months ago. But when it did, it wasn't only the building itself that changed, but everyone's memories of it as well. So everyone, including me, thinks it has been the Pentagon from the moment its cornerstone (vertexstone? whatever) was laid...It was converted into the Pentagon on Halloween, just about two months ago, when a significant chunk of the United States military-industrial complex was taken over by witches."

"Sportsmanship is for sportsmen."

""We’re bankers. That is really all we are. If you’ve been imagining some sort of fabulous conspiracy, you are in for a disappointment. Bankers, you see, don’t actually do very much. We take our percentage. That is all. We subsist on movements of money—across space, across time, and between Strands.”"

"In this dream, Dodge was in the small town in Iowa where he had grown up...the grid street pattern of that town was, decades later, the spatial lattice on which virtually all of his dreams were constructed. It was the graph paper on which his mind seemed to need to plot things."

"The amount of time spent asleep didn't really matter. He had decided that the key to it all — the one thing that determined whether the nap would actually refresh him — was the breaking of the thread of consciousness...Even if he woke up ten seconds later, he would be as refreshed — possibly more so — as if he'd slumbered deeply for an hour."

"“I need you down here,” said his boss. “All hands on deck.” Then he hung up without explanation, leaving Corvallis with the vague feeling that he was missing something. ... The trail of notifications on his phone told the story. They had originated from various people on various social networks, but they had all been triggered by the same event: the surprising obliteration of the town of Moab, Utah, by what was apparently a tactical nuclear weapon."

"Someone in DC posted a snapshot of a pizza delivery guy on a Pentagon-bound Metro train, toting a stack of pizzas so high he had to use a two-wheeled dolly. Self-proclaimed experts in the comment thread were climbing all over one another to explain that massive pizza deliveries to the Pentagon were an infallible sign that something big was happening."

"In reenactment groups it was customary for each participant to adopt a persona, or, at a bare minimum, a nickname that wouldn't sound too jarringly anachronistic when called out in the heat of action. Corvallis had become Corvus, which was just the Latin word for “crow.” ... At first he'd been mildly uncomfortable with it.... He now saw it through a hybrid of Pacific Northwest aboriginal myths and Roman aviomancy. ... Crows, or ravens (the distinction was unclear), were set apart by their extreme intelligence, memory, and resourcefulness; but no matter how well they embodied those fine traits, no one appreciated them."

"Of crows, people tended to predicate the same traits that they did of Asians.... Crows were commendably intelligent, and forever busy, but you couldn't tell them apart and their motives were inscrutable. But living inside of his own head, Corvus well knew his own motives. There was nothing wrong with those motives and he didn't need to justify them to anyone else."

"The Moab hoaxers had inoculated the [Internet] with a ready-made hoax narrative that was obviously ridiculous, and tailor-made to appeal to the vociferous citizens of Crazytown. Right now everyone's uncle Harry—the angry truther at Thanksgiving dinner—was typing as fast as he could with the caps lock key in effect."

"Stand-up peeing in a long flowing garment could lead to various mishaps."

"Having spent the whole day sifting through incredibly depressing news reports, [the White House press corps] were bouncing back to a kind of giddy frame of mind brought on by a combination of completely natural and understandable happiness that Moab was fine...and schadenfreude directed at the social media companies that had been chipping away at their industry and their job security for the last couple of decades. Pointed questions were asked about how just unbelievably irresponsible those companies had been today and whether the scorpion-filled pits into which their executives should now be lowered should be a thousand meters deep or two thousand."

"All of the people in the conspiracy/troll ecosystem had been sucked into the vortex of Moab and begun to devote excruciating levels of attention to the entire cast of characters...performers in all of the fake videos and Corvallis Kawasaki. For he had been identified by name, on national television, by the president of the United States.... So within 24 hours, the citizens of Crazytown had compiled a huge dossier of mostly wrong material on him.... Crazytown was repelled by facts and knowledge, as oil fled from water, but was fascinated by the absence of hard facts, since it provided vacant space in which to construct elaborate edifices of speculation."

"The ancestral home of the Forthrasts was situated in the northwestern quadrant of Iowa...now being displayed in miniature, superimposed on a coffee table in an eating club at Princeton University, visible only to Sophia and to the friends she had shared it with: Phil, Julian, and Anne-Solenne. They could see it as long as they were wearing their glasses. They were planning a summer road trip. They had worked it out as far as Des Moines by following interstate highways. Now Sophia was proposing a diagonal transit to Sioux City on two-lane roads. The very idea of it had led to blank stares...until a solution had taken shape in the agile brain of Sophia's boyfriend Phil: “Look. I’m just not going to tell my parents—or anyone—that we are temporarily going off grid.” ... Sophia decided on the spot not to dump Phil for at least another few weeks."

"“Where are you from?” Sophia asked. Larry looked a bit startled. "I’m from here…Great-greats came over from Holland." "You said ‘y’all.’" Larry was confused.... "What was that about?" Anne-Solenne asked. "It’s totally a Southern way of talking. Iowa is a Northern state. Fought on the Union side in the Civil War. Never had slavery…Northerners don’t talk like that, they don’t drawl, they don’t say ‘y’all’...” “Or put the Stars and Bars on their bumpers,” said Julian...and pointed at a Confederate flag sticker on the back of Tom and Kevin's truck. “Point being, it was not like that to my uncle...When he was born, the Civil War was only ninety years in the past—almost within living memory. It would have seemed weird for Northerners to paste the traitors’ flag on their bumper or cop an accent from Alabama. But while he was alive—” “The cultural border shifted north.”"

"There was no one moment when they definitely crossed over into Ameristan. The closest thing to a formal ceremony was when Tom pulled over onto the gravel shoulder of a two-lane road between cornfields and yanked off the vehicles' license plates—which was evidently held on with magnets... Then the caravan was back on the road. “When in Rome,” Julian said... About an hour out of Des Moines, they did pass by a tiny sign—Sharpie on plywood—bearing what might have been the burning-cross logo of the Levitican Church."

"“Ted has normal-people teeth because he is old and grew up before this part of the world got Facebooked. After that, the people with education fled to places like Ames, Des Moines, Iowa City. Which includes dentists. A few mainline churches used to run charity dental clinics where you could get a bad tooth pulled, or whatever, but those are being chased away by these people.”"

"“There’s been all kinds of confusion about the Leviticans. Some kind of imagined link to the Ku Klux Klan.” “Maybe it’s because of the burning crosses,” Phil suggested, deadpan. “Supposedly the KKK burned crosses,” Ted said with a roll of the eyes. “There’s no ‘supposedly’ about it,” Anne-Solenne started in. “What are you even—” But Sophia silenced her with a hand on the arm. There was no point. “If that is even true, it has no connection to our burning crosses, which have a completely different significance,” Ted announced."

"Having caught Phil's eye, Sophia panned her gaze across the entire scene, asking him to take it all in. Reminding him that this wasn't Princeton. This was Ameristan. Facebooked to the molecular level. “Professor Long,” she muttered, “the Red Card.” It was a reference to...a wallet card for people to keep in front of them during conversations like this one. One side of the card was solid red, with no words or images, and was meant to be displayed outward as a nonverbal signal that you disagreed and that you weren't going to be drawn into a fake argument. The other side, facing the user, was a list of little reminders as to what was really going on: 1. Speech is aggression 2. Every utterance has a winner and a loser 3. Curiosity is feigned 4. Lying is performative 5. Stupidity is power"

"None of them said a word until they had parked in the Walmart's lot. “I am gonna buy some flowers,” Sophia said, “to put on the grave. We’re almost there. Within the blast radius of this.” She nodded toward the front of the superstore. “Blast radius?" “It’s only ten miles farther. Any retail base in the actual town will have been obliterated by this. So if we want to buy anything, we have to buy it here.”"

"They laid in a course for Moab, which ought to have been as simple as laying in a course for any other place. But a little warning did come up on Sophia's UI, letting her know that the existence of Moab was in question. Opinions differed as to whether it had been burned off the surface of the world by a nuclear blast twelve years ago. ... “It’s easy to forget,” Sophia remarked, “that there are millions of people who really don’t believe that Moab still exists. But when you’re here, you see the REMEMBER MOAB stickers all over the place.”"

"“One of Enoch’s ancestors was, like, the great-great-granddad of fractal geometry,” Julian reported. “In 1791—” “Oh, god, please don’t read the Wikipedia entry,” Enoch said, showing more emotion than when he had been literally crucified. “I have an edit overlay that filters out most of the garbage,” said Julian, mildly offended that Enoch had taken him for the kind of person who would actually take Wikipedia at face value. “But, Julian, I am sitting right next to you and so you don’t have to consult an online source.”"

"The Utah state legislature had been taken over by Moab truthers who insisted that Moab had been obliterated by nuclear terrorism 12 years ago. From which it followed that anyone claiming to actually live there was a troll, a crisis actor in the pay of, or a sad dupe in thrall to, global conspirators trying to foist a monstrous denial of the truth on decent folk. In recognition of, and indignation over, which they had passed a law ordering the state licensing bureau to stop accepting motor vehicle paperwork from Moab."

"“I could not be more confused as to what we are looking at right now,” announced Gloria Waterhouse. She was a philanthropist, connected with her family's foundation, nontechnical, and always the first to stand up and request commonsense explanations when the discourse became too academic. She'd assigned herself that role and she did it well."

"Her free hand came up. Daisy came up with it, the faded plastic petals floating in front of her face but gradually fading from view as she sank."

"Agreement got by compulsion or trickery is not agreement, but a thing akin to slavery. Free minds are the only company worth having."

"Corvallis took to the air and went for a spin on some tempting thermals while the visitors were shown in... He had known them now for forty years and resigned himself to the fact that their appearance did not change over time. He wheeled around them anyway, peering down on them from all angles. “Calling a meeting of the Societas Eruditorum?” C-plus asked. “You’re the only member left.""

"Six dawns in a row, a new soul glimmered on a branch of the old tree, only to fade in the strong light of the day...It looked like a star softened by drifting fog and mist... On the seventh morning it seemed to discard all hopes and intentions of ever making light of its own, and darkened and solidified into the form of a black bird."

"“I understand the speed of light!” Zula blurted. Faces turned toward her, gawped, then turned away. A hundred years ago, someone would have taken her up on the gambit. Now people were too intimidated—or perhaps they assumed she was finally losing it. Except for Enoch. “Explain it,” he urged her. “I’ve always wanted to understand.”"

"No sky, no neighboring houses, no trees, no mountains. The fog had clamped it all off. It muffled sound too...She and Enoch were existing in a bubble of space maybe a hundred paces across... She wondered if it had been thus for Dodge in the beginning, when he had been alone in Bitworld and the Landform had begun to take shape around him."

"“Where on earth are you going?” Zula asked, looking about for him. But she had lost him in the radiant fog. His voice was clear, though. It was the only sound in the world. “I’m not entirely sure,” he admitted. “But I’m done here. I did what I was sent to do.” The golden light grew until it was all she could see, and his voice was heard no more."

"Disco is the best floor show in town. It's very democratic, boys with boys, girls with girls, girls with boys, blacks and whites, capitalists and Marxists, Chinese and everything else, all in one big mix."

"It's a scientific fact that if you stay in California you lose one point of your IQ every year."

"It seemed odd to Joel that nature did not reflect so solemn an event: flowers of cotton-boll clouds within a sky as scandalously blue as kitten-eyes were offensive to their sweet disrespect."

"A resident of over a hundred years in so narrow a world deserved higher homage."

"The brain may take advice, but not the heart, and love, having no geography, knows no boundaries: weight and sink it deep, no matter, it will rise and find the surface: and why not? any love is natural and beautiful that lies within a person's nature; only hypocrites would hold a man responsible for what he loves, emotional illiterates and those of righteous envy, who, in their agitated concern, mistake so frequently the arrow pointing to heaven for the one that leads to hell."

"The true beloveds of this world are in their lover's eyes lilacs opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favorite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory."

"Never trust a nigger: their minds and hair are full of kinks in equal measure."

"She beckoned to him, shining and silver, and he knew he must go: unafraid, not hesitating, he paused only at the garden's edge, as though he'd forgotten something, he stopped and looked back at the bloomless, descending blue, at the boy he had left behind."

"But my dear, so few things are fulfilled: what are most lives but a series of incomplete episodes"

"Past certain ages or certain wisdoms it is very difficult to look with wonder; it is best done when one is a child; after that, and if you are lucky, you will find a bridge of childhood and walk across it."

"“The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call “out there.”"

"I ought at least to have made corporal. But I never did. Know why? Because the sergeant we had was tough. Because I wouldn't roll over. Jesus, I hate that stuff. I can't stand it. Though—I don't know. Some queers I really liked. As long as they didn't try anything. The most worthwhile friend I ever had, really sensitive and intelligent, he turned out to be queer."

"She had said she was afraid of Perry, and she was, but was it simply Perry she feared, or was it a configuration of which he was part [...]? The eldest, the brother she loved, had shot himself; Fern had fallen out of a window, or jumped; and Perry was committed to violence, a criminal."

"Envy was constantly with him; the Enemy was anyone who was someone he wanted to be or who had anything he wanted to have."

"“Just remember: If one bird carried every grain of sand, grain by grain, across the ocean, by the time he got them all on the other side, that would only be the beginning of eternity.”"

"“Imagination, of course, can open any door - turn the key and let terror walk right in.”"

"“There is considerable hypocrisy in conventionalism. Any thinking person is aware of this paradox; but in dealing with conventional people it is advantageous to treat them as though they were not hypocrites. It isn't a question of faithfulness to your own concepts; it is a matter of compromise so that you can remain an individual without the constant threat of conventional pressures.”"

"“They [the Clutters] never hurt me. Like other people. Like people have all my life. Maybe it's just that the Clutters were the ones who had to pay for it.”"

"In the disposition of capital cases in the United States, the median elapsed time between sentence and execution is approximately seventeen months. [...] However, even an attorney of moderate talent can postpone doomsday year after year, for the system of appeals that pervades American jurisprudence amounts to a legalistic wheel of fortune [...]."

"I wouldn't roll over. Jesus, I hate that stuff."

"All writing, all art, is an act of faith. If one tries to contribute to human understanding, how can that be called decadent? It's like saying a declaration of love is an act of decadence. Any work of art, provide it springs from a sincere motivation to further understanding between people, is an act of faith and therefore is an act of love."

"Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself."

"Finding the right form for your story is simply to realize the most natural way of telling the story. The test of whether or not a writer has divined the natural shape of his story is just this: after reading it, can you imagine it differently, or does it silence your imagination and seem to you absolute and final? As an orange is final. As an orange is something nature has made just right."

"[You've said your material chooses you.] That's the difference between the serious artist and the craftsman—-the craftsman can take material and because of his abilities do a professional job of it. The serious artist, like Proust, is like an object caught by a wave and swept to shore. He's obsessed by his material; it's like a venom working in his blood and the art is the antidote."

"People who are having a love-sex relationship are continuously lying to each other because the very nature of the relationship demands that they do, because you have to make a love object of this person, which means that you editorialize about them. You know? You cut out what you don't want to see, you add this if it isn't there. And so therefore you're building a lie. But in a friendship you don't do that. You do exactly the reverse. You try more and more to be as completely pure and straight as you can be."

"Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor."

"not since the early work of Eudora Welty has there been an example of such striking literary virtuosity. Even if Mr. Capote were ten or twenty years older than he is, his powers of description and evocation, his ability to bend language to his poetic moods, his ear for dialect and for the varied rhythms of speech would be remarkable. In one so young this much skill represents a kind of genius. On the other hand, I find myself deeply antipathetic to the whole artistic-moral purpose of Mr. Capote's novel. In Mr. Capote's case, as with so many of our gifted contemporary artists, I would freely trade eighty percent of his technical skill for twenty percent more value in the uses to which it is put."

"When a war is won, it's the losers, not the winners, who are liberated."

"Disease-carrying thoughts swarm and multiply in the dark and twisted labyrinths of our minds, and all that is needed is a mob and a good political slogan for the epidemic to be spread once again, with a burst of automatic weapons or a mushroom cloud."

"I sat day after day in my little room, waiting for inspiration to visit me, trying to invent a pseudonym that would express, in a combination of noble and striking sounds, our dream of artistic achievement, a pen name grand enough to compensate for my own feeling of insecurity and helplessness at the idea of everything my mother expected from me."

"A writer’s subconscious is one of the filthiest places there are: as a matter of fact, you can find the whole world there."

"There is more to Jewish history than Auschwitz."

"Gari in Russian means "burn!"… I want to test myself, a trial by fire, so that my I is burned off."

"During the war he was an airman and slaughtered civilians from on high."

"The gossip that came back to me from fashionable dinners where people pitied poor Romain Gary, who must be a little sad, a little jealous of the meteoric rise in the literary firmament of his cousin Emile Ajar… I’ve had a lot of fun. Good-bye, and thank you."

"Humour is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him."

"The bombs I dropped on Germany between 1940 and 1944 maybe killed a Rilke or a Goethe or a Hölderin in his cradle. And yes, of course, if it had to be done over, I would do it again. Hitler had condemned us to kill. Not even the most just causes are ever innocent."

"Gary’s life was shaped by war, revolution, emigration, anti-Semitism, defeat, and murderous low-altitude bombing runs. But he never wallowed in victimhood – quite the contrary. He wrote scathing satires of the victim syndrome, and never claimed that his changes of country and language were anything but opportunities to be someone else. He didn’t need to know whether he was Russian, or Jewish, or Polish, or Catholic, or French. In a questionnaire on ethnic identity he would have answered: all of the above. Gary is a good model for our own century of transnational lives."

"In 1966, Gary and Seberg visited the memorial of the Warsaw ghetto, in the city where he’d lived as a child for several years before moving to France. This confrontation with the trauma of history — a horror he narrowly avoided — was overwhelming. Gary hallucinated the arm of a hidden Jew emerging from a sewer grill shaking its fist, and fainted from the shock. When he came to, some combination of survivor’s guilt and righteous anger was conceived, taking shape in The Dance of Genghis Cohn (1967) — a breathtakingly original, hilarious, and complex exploration of Gary as a man, an author, and a Jew. Genghis (né Moishe) Cohn, a comedian from Berlin imprisoned in Auschwitz, exposes his bare bottom to Schatz, the SS officer who kills him, and instructs him to “Kush mire in toques.” (Opines Cohn’s ghost: “There have undoubtedly been more worthy and noble last words in history than ‘Kiss my ass,’ but I have never made any claim to greatness and, besides, I’m quite pleased with my effort…”)."

"Too famous for his work to be judged without bias, Gary felt he needed to break free from categorization. So, in 1973, at age 59 — the same age his mother was when she died — Gary invented Émile Ajar. He was by then twice divorced, retired from the diplomatic corps, and had published 22 books, including the Goncourt-winning The Roots of Heaven (1956), about illegal elephant poaching in Africa. It was time for a new adventure, as he explains in The Life and Death of Émile Ajar: “I was tired of being nothing but myself…there was the nostalgia for one’s youth, for one’s debut, for one’s renewal…. I was profoundly affected by the oldest protean temptation of man: that of multiplicity.” … events turned downright farcical. The Life Before Us was awarded the 1975 Prix Goncourt, the rules of which stipulate that it may be awarded to an author just once in his lifetime, and Gary had already received it for The Roots of Heaven. He instructed Ajar’s lawyer to turn down the honor on her client’s behalf, but the prize administrators would hear nothing of it. “The Goncourt Prize cannot be accepted or refused any more than life and death. Mr. Ajar remains the laureate.”"

"Beyond Gary’s creative mendacity, one aspect of his life was indubitably genuine. After Germany invaded France, Gary escaped to London, where he became a war hero, serving as a fearless bomber pilot for the Free French Forces. Flying missions even when recuperating from battle wounds, Gary fought a feisty personal, even visceral battle against the Nazis (in one interview, Gary described himself as “testicularly anti-racist”) that was a concrete reality in a life devoted to more amorphous artistry, and his wartime loyalties remained a permanent obsession."

"When it counted, Gary was ultimately accurate, as when he left a suicide note in 1980, explaining that he decided to end his life because he had written all he wished to write and not because his estranged and tormented ex-wife, film star Jean Seberg, had committed suicide a year earlier. Yet such basic home truths in Gary’s life and work can be obscured by his prose style and grandiose, self-mythifying persona. The Dance of Genghis Cohn itself demonstrates Gary’s paradoxical approach of using, as Bellos observes, “vulgarity and coruscating wit to defeat the greatest obscenity of 20th-century history, the slaughter of the Jews by Nazi Germany.” The novel’s protagonist (a blend of Mongol and Jewish, as Gary himself claimed to be), murdered by the Nazis in 1943, becomes a dybbuk in the mind of his executioner. The victim/protagonist forces his murderer to sing songs redolent of Yiddishkeit, like “My Yiddishe Mama.” Such burlesque ironies, painted with broad brushstrokes in a popular novel published one year before the release of Mel Brooks’s film The Producers, demonstrated the comic potential of ridiculing Hitler, but offended some readers in France, notably a critic from the weekly news magazine L’Express, who termed The Dance of Genghis Cohn an “affront to the memory of those who died at Auschwitz.” Forty-five years on, readers and critics are relishing the same pitilessly absurdist authorial voice, describing savage and coarse events of modern history in the savage and coarse terms that so troubled Gary’s readers when his books first appeared decades ago."

"In 1975, Emile Ajar's second novel, La Vie devant soi, was a French literary sensation. The fictionalised memoir of an Arab boy growing up in a Parisian suburb, packed with extraordinary slang, aggressive jokes and almost unbelievable characters, the book was lathered with praise by critics, eventually winning the Goncourt, the French equivalent of the Booker. It went on to become the bestselling French novel of the 20th century. There was only one problem: Ajar was actually Roman Gary, already a bestselling French author (and previous winner of the Goncourt, which is supposed to be awarded to any particular writer only once), who had reinvented himself to outwit the literary establishment and win a new readership."

"By the time Romain Gary shot himself in the head, the French-Russian writer had published over fifty novels under four different names, directed two movies, fought in the air force, and represented France as a consul. His marriages — first to the British writer Lesley Branch, then to the American actress Jean Seberg — had brought him celebrity. He had enmeshed some of France’s literary giants in an elaborate hoax that broke fundamental precepts of the country’s cultural institutions. But Gary always saw his own life as a series of incomplete drafts. Even as he planned his own death, he remained on the path to self-improvement. “To renew myself, to relive, to be someone else, was always the great temptation of my existence,” read the essay he left with his suicide note. It’s perhaps no surprise that biographies of the author often seem overwhelmed by the slippery nature of their subject. “Romain Gary: The Chameleon,” “Romain Gary: The Man who Sold his Shadow.” Gary was one of France’s most successful writers, but he lived the life of a spy."

"They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the power of the things they carried."

"They were afraid of dying but even more afraid to show it."

"They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing — these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight."

"They carried the soldier's greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to."

"Knowledge, of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead."

"I remember opening the letter, scanning the first few lines, feeling the blood go thick behind my eyes. I remember a sound in my head. It wasn't thinking, just a silent howl. A million things all at once — I was too good for this war. Too smart, too compassionate, too everything. It couldn't happen. I was above it."

"At night, when I couldn't sleep, I'd sometimes carry on silent arguments with those people. I'd be screaming at them, telling them how much I detested their blind, thoughtless, automatic acquiescence to it all, their simpleminded patriotism, their prideful ignorance, their love-it-or-leave it platitudes, how they were sending me off to fight a war they didn't understand and didn't want to understand."

"You were a treasonous pussy if you had second thoughts about killing and dying for plain and simple reasons."

"Intellect had run up against emotion. My conscience told me to run, yet some irrational and powerful force was resisting, like a weight pushing me toward the war. What it came to, stupidly, was a sense of shame. Hot, stupid shame. I did not want people to think badly of me."

"Right then, with the shore so close, I understood that I would not do what I should do. I would not swim away from my hometown and my country and my life. I would not be brave."

"I would go to the war — I would kill and maybe die — because I was embarrassed not to. That was the sad thing. And so I sat in the bow of the boat and cried."

"I survived, but it's not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war."

"To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true."

"Any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. the grass, the soil — everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble."

"For example, we've all heard this one. Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast and saves his three buddies. Is it true? The answer matters. You'd feel cheated if it never happened. Without the grounding of reality, it's just a trite bit of puffery, pure Hollywood, untrue in the way all such stories are untrue"

"A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. For example: Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast, but it's a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die, though, one of the dead guys says, "The fuck you do that for?" and the jumper says, "Story of my life, man" and other guys start to smile but he's dead. That's a true story that never happened."

"There were times in my life when I couldn't feel much, not sadness or pity or passion, and somehow I blamed this place for what I had become, and I blamed it for taking away the person I had once been."

"'Well, I still don't get it,' she said. 'The way you talk, it sounds calculating or something. Too cold. Planning every tiny detail.' 'And that's bad?' 'No. Not exactly.' 'What then?' She made a shifting motion with her shoulders. 'I don't know, it just seem strange, sort of. How you've figured everything out, all the angles, except what it's for.' 'For us,' he said. 'I love you, Kath.' 'But it feels — I shouldn't say this — it feels manipulating.'... He talked about leading a good life, doing good things for the world. Yet even as he spoke, John realized he was not telling the full truth. Politics was manipulation. (p. 35)"

"Fuck it. Kill Jesus."

"Did I choose this life of illusion? Don't be mad. My bed was made, I just lied in it. (p. 87)"

"The way I see it, he came back pretty shattered, pretty fucked up, then he got married to Kathy and they had this really great love thing going. Never saw two people so feelie-grabbie. So he gets his life back together. Doesn't say anything about the Vietnam shit — not to his wife or me or anybody. And then after a while he can't say anything. Sort of trapped, you know? That's my theory. I don't think it started out as an intentional lie, he just kept mum about it — who the hell wouldn't? — and pretty soon he probably talked himself into believing it never happened at all. The guy was a magic man... I guess it basically boils down to a case of colossal self-deception."

"It was the spirit world. Vietnam. Ghosts and graveyards. I arrived in-country a year after John Wade, in 1969, and walked exactly the ground he walked, in and around Pinkville, through the villages of Thuan yen and My Khe and Co Luy. I know what happened that day. I know how it happened. I know why. It was the sunlight. It was the wickedness that soaks into your blood and slowly heats up and begins to boil. Frustration, partly. Rage, partly. The enemy was invisible. They were ghosts. (p. 199)"

"A fat little kid doing magic in front of a stand-up mirror. 'Hey, kiddo, that's a good one,' his father could've said, but for reasons unknown, reasons mysterious, the words never got spoken. He had wanted to be loved. And to be loved he had practiced deception. He had hidden the bad things. He had tricked up his own life. Only for love. Only to be loved. (pp. 242-243)"

"Maybe in the fog Kathy said, 'We could do it — right now,' and maybe Sorcerer murmured something about a pair of snakes along a trail in Pinkville, how for years and years he had wondered what would've happened if those two dumb-ass snakes had somehow managed to gobble each other up. A tired old story. If Kathy smiled, it was out of politeness. But maybe she said, 'I dare us.' (p. 300)"

"We are fascinated, all of us, by the implacable otherness of others. And we wish to penetrate by hypothesis, by daydream, by scientific investigation those leaden walls that encase the human spirit, that define it and guard it and hold it forever inaccessible. ("I love you," someone says, and instantly we begin to wonder--"Well, how much?"--and when the answer comes--"With my whole heart"--we then wonder about the wholeness of a fickle heart.) Our lovers, our husbands, our wives, our farthers, our gods--they are all beyond us. (p. 101 )"

"[on the My Lai massacre and the outcome]: Who's responsible? The human beings who did this. These are war crimes. The individual human beings who put a rifle muzzle up against a baby's head and shot the brains out of that baby, nothing happened to them. Nothing! (quoted in the companion book by Geoffrey Ward and Ken Burns, p. 473)"

"[remembering the day he got his draft notice] It was a summer afternoon, maybe June of '68. And I remember taking that envelope into the house and putting it on the kitchen table where my mom and dad were having lunch. They just looked at it and knew what it was. The silence of that lunch. I didn't speak, my mom didn't speak, my dad didn't speak. It was just that piece of paper lying at the center of the table. It was enough to make me cry to this day, not for myself, but for my mom and dad, both of whom had been in the Navy during World War Two, and had believed in service to one's country and all those values. (from the companion book, p. 318)"

"On the one hand I did think the war was less than righteous. On the other hand I love my country. And I valued my life in a small town and my friends and family. So I wrestled with what was, for me, at least, more torturous and devastating and emotionally painful than anything that happened in Vietnam. Do you go off and kill people if you're not pretty sure it's right? And if your nation isn't pretty sure it's right? If there isn't some consensus, do you do that? In the end, I just capitulated, and one day I got on a bus with some other recent graduates, and we went over to Sioux Falls about sixty miles away, and raised our hands and went into the Army. But it wasn't a decision; it was a forfeiture of a decision. It was letting my body go, turning a switch in my conscience, just turning it off, so it wouldn't be barking at me saying, "You're doing a bad and evil and stupid and unpatriotic thing." (from the companion book, p. 318)"

"I feel the poet does write on memory but... Wasn't it Aristotle who said the historian keeps the factual record of mankind and the poet writes the emotional history of mankind? I think you can read a history of Vietnam and know that so many men under the age of twenty were killed, or you can read Tim O'Brien and you can "feel" those deaths. O'Brien is preserving the emotional history of Vietnam. A historian is preserving the facts."

"I really like the way he writes about writing. He'll write a story, and then he'll write about how he wrote the story. Next he'll get into a story that he imagines. Then he'll hear from the person that he was writing about, and modify the story. He does a beautiful job."

"I was just reading Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, and I felt the American war in Vietnam in my bones."

"The Internet has made me very casual with a level of omniscience that was unthinkable a decade ago. I now wonder if God gets bored knowing the answer to everything."

"I wonder that all things seem to be from hell these days: dates, jobs, parties, weather .... Could the situation be that we no long believe in that particular place? Or maybe we were all promised heaven in our lifetimes, and what we ended up with can't help but suffer in comparison."

"You see, when you're middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you. You have to live with the fact that history can never champion your causes and that history will never feel sorry for you. It is the price that is paid for day-to-day comfort and silence. And because of this price, all happinesses are sterile; all sadnesses go unpitied."

"Starved for affection, terrified of abandonment, I began to wonder if sex was really just an excuse to look deeply into another human being's eyes."

"All events became omens; I lost the ability to take anything literally."

"… after you're dead and buried and floating around whatever place we go to, what's going to be your best memory of Earth? … What moment for you defines what it's like to be alive on this planet?"

"Fake yuppie experiences that you had to spend money on, like white water rafting or elephant rides in Thailand don't count. I want to hear some small moment from your life that proves you're really alive."

"I don't want dainty little moments of insight …"

"We live small lives on the periphery; we are marginalized and there's a great deal in which we choose not to participate. We wanted silence and we have that silence now. We arrived here speckled in sores and zits, our colons so tied in knots that we never thought we'd have a bowel movement again. Our systems had stopped working, jammed with the odor of copy machines, Wite-Out, the smell of bond paper, and the endless stress of pointless jobs done grudgingly to little applause. We had compulsions that made us confuse shopping with creativity, to take downers and assume that merely renting a video on a Saturday night was enough. But now that we live here in the desert, things are much, much better."

"McJob: A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held one."

"Poverty Jet Set: A group of people given to chronic travelling at the expense of long-term job stability or a permenant residence. Tend to have doomed and extremely expensive phone call relationships with people named Serge or Ilyana. Tend to discuss frequent flyer programs at parties."

"Historical Underdosing: To living a period of time when nothing seems to happen. Major symptoms include addiction to newspapers, magazines, and TV news broadcasts."

"Historical Overdosing: to live in a period of time when too much seems to happen. Major symptoms include addiction to newspapers, magazines, and TV news broadcasts."

"Historical Slumming: The act of visiting locations such as diners, smokestack industrial sites, rural village—locations where time appears to have been frozen many years back—so as to experience relief when one returns back to “the present.”"

"Brazilification: The widening gulf between the rich and the poor and the accompanying disappearance of the middle classes."

"Vaccinated Time Travel: To fantasize about traveling backward in time, but only with proper vaccinations."

"Decade Blending: In clothing: the indiscriminate combination of two or more items from various decades to create a personal mood: Sheila = Mary Quant earrings (1960s) + cork wedgie platform shoes (1970s) + black leather jacket (1950s and 1980s)."

"Veal-Fattening Pen: Small, cramped office workstations built of fabric-covered disassemblable wall partitions and inhabited by junior staff members. Named after the small preslaughter cubicles used by the cattle industry."

"Emotional Ketchup Burst: The bottling up of opinions and emotions inside onself so that they explosively burst forth all at once, shocking and confusing employers and friends—most of whom thought things were fine."

"Bleeding Ponytail: An elderly sold out baby boomer who pines for hippie or pre-sellout days."

"Boomer Envy: Envy of material wealth and long-range material security accrued by older members of the baby boom generation by virtue of fortunate births."

"Clique Maintenance: The need of one generation to see the generation following it as deficient so as to bolster its own collective ego: Kids today do nothing. They’re so apathetic. We used to go out and protest. All they do is shop and complain."

"Consensus Terrorism: The process that decides in-office attitudes and behavior."

"Grandpa, like most of the fun-loving gang who built the Plants, just wanted to die or have his brain turn to oatmeal before it becomes too apparent exactly what a nightmare he and his buddies have saddled their descendants with."

"Meeting Anna-Louise was like finding a stranger's shopping list on the mall floor and realising there are other, more interesting diets than your own. It was the first time I ever felt incomplete."

"'Is the hotel Marge? It has to be Marge. I want atmosphere.' Marge is Anna-Louise's word describing sad, 1950s-ish diner-type places where the waitresses are named Marge."

"Preemptive boringness. Being one-dimensional is the most satisfying method of coping with out-of-control people - with any situation that's out of control … Don't let people know the ideas you love, the games you've played, the places you've visited in your mind. Keep your treasure to yourself."

"I think about how I think I know a person then 'poof!' I discover I only knew a cartoon version. Suddenly there's this fleshy, demanding, noisy creature in front of me, unknowable and just as lost as I am, and equally unable to remember that every soul in the world is hurting, not just themselves."

"We call Jasmine's room 'The Harem,' a sexy place, about which Dan never complained, even though his own possessions, his laptop PC and briefcase, for example, looked crazy in the environment, invasive and overcomplex, like Stealth bombers in SmurfWorld."

"When you grow older a dreadful, horrible sensation will come over you. It's called loneliness, and you think you know what it is now, but you don't. Here is a list of the symptoms, and don't worry - loneliness is the most universal sensation on the planet. Just remember one fact - loneliness will pass. You will survive and you will be a better human for it."

"I have this feeling watching Jasmine - that as you grow older, it becomes harder to feel 100 percent happy; you learn all the things that can go wrong; you become superstitious about tempting fate, about bringing disaster upon your life by accidentally feeling too good one day."

"I'm beginning to feel like a microwaved egg that will explode if anybody so much as breathes onto the surface."

"I tell you what: I give you all of my strength - I seal it inside a little green envelope and mail it to you with hope and peace and much much love. Take all you need and take it quickly."

"Your inability to achieve solitude makes you settle for substandard relationships."

"You don't believe magic is possible in lives lived within traditional boundaries."

"You are paralyzed by the fact that cruelty is often amusing."

"You pretend to be more eccentric than you actually are because you worry you are an interchangeable cog."

"You still don't know what you do well."

"You wilfully ignore the small, gentle observations in life which you know are the most important."

"Your refusal to acknowledge the dark side of humanity makes you prey to that dark side."

"You worry that if you lower your guard, even for one second, your whole world will disintegrate into chaos."

"You wait for fate to bring about the changes in life which you should be bringing about yourself."

"I mean five thousand years ago people emerge out of nowhere -- sproing!—with brains and everything and begin wrecking the planet. You'd think we'd give the issue a little more thought than we do."

"Your own nature will triumph. We are all born with our natures... And I think back over my life and I realize that my own nature -the core me- essentially hasn't changed over all these years. When I wake up in the morning, for those first few moments before I remember where I am or when I am, I still feel the same way I did when I woke up at the age of five."

"Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we've missed the chance to have had people hurt us. To a younger me this sounded like luck; to an older me this sounded like a quiet tragedy."

"Technology does not always equal progress."

"I thought that intimacy with another soul was the closest I could ever come to leaving my body."

"When you're young you always feel that life hasn't yet begun...But then suddenly you're old and the scheduled life didn't arrive."

"I realized a capacity for not feeling lonely carried a very real price, which was the threat of feeling nothing at all."

"Is feeling nothing the inevitable result of believing in nothing? ...I thought it would be such a sick joke to have to remain alive for decades and not believe in or feel anything."

"...I realized that once people are broken in certain ways they can't ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one."

"Compromise is said to be the way of the world and yet I find myself feeling sick trying to accept what it has done to me."

"I'm trying to feel more well adjusted than I really am, which is, I guess, the human condition."

"What is the one thing more than any other thing that makes one person different from any other person?"

"...when you're in love, all of your doors are open, and all of their doors are open. And you roller-skate down your halls together."

"The two of you start talking about your feelings and your feelings float outside of you like vapors, and they mix together like a fog. Before you realize it, the two of you have become the same mist and you realize you can never return to being just a lone cloud again, because the isolation would be intolerable."

"I told Ethan that I speak in an unrestricted manner to animals—things like, aren't you just the cutest little kitty... that kind of thing, which I wouldn't dream of doing to humans. Then I realized I wish I could."

"I used to always think I had to have a reason to record my observations of the day, or even my emotions, but now I think simply being alive is more than enough reason."

"Language is such a technology."

"We are at the vanguard of adolescent protraction."

"Destiny is what we work toward. The future doesn't exist yet. Fate is for losers."

"At what point in our lives do we stop blurring? When do we become crisp individuals? What must we do in order to end these fuzzy identities - to clarify just who it is we really are?"

"We had all awakened X number of years past our youth feeling sleazy and harsh. Choices still existed, but they were no longer infinite. Fun had become a scrim, concealing the hysteria that lay behind it."

"At twenty you know you're not going to be a rock star... by twenty-five you know you're not going to be a dentist or a professional... by thirty, a darkness starts moving in - you wonder if you're ever going to be fulfilled, let alone wealthy or successful... by thirty-five, you know, basically, what you're going to be doing the rest of your life; you become resigned to your fate."

"Nobody believes the identities we've made for ourselves. I feel like everybody in the world is fake now - as though people had true cores once, but hucked them away and replaced them with something more attractive but also hollow."

"There's nothing at the center of what we do."

"Her friends have become who they've become by default. Their dreams are forgotten, or were never formulated to begin with."

"There's a hardness I'm seeing in modern people. Those little moments of goofiness that used to make the day pass seem to have gone. Life's so serious now."

"What's the point of being efficient if you're only leading an efficiently blank life?"

"We barely have enough time to figure out who we are and then we become bitter and isolated as we age."

"Scrape. Feel. Dig. Believe. Ask."

"Ask whatever challenges dead and thoughtless beliefs."

"If you're not spending every waking moment of your life radically rethinking the nature of the world - if you're not plotting every moment boiling the carcass of the old order - then you're wasting your day."

"A thousand years ago this wouldn’t have been the case. If human beings had suddenly vanished a thousand years ago, the planet would have healed overnight with no damage. Maybe a few lumps where the pyramids stand. One hundred years ago—or even fifty years ago—the world would have healed itself just fine in the absence of people. But not now. We crossed the line. The only thing that can keep the planet turning smoothly now is human free will forged into effort. Nothing else. That’s why the world has seemed so large in the past few years, and time so screwy. It’s because Earth is now totally ours."

"If you want to get close to somebody, you have to tell him or her something intimate about yourself. They'll tell you something intimate in return, and if you keep this going, maybe you'll end up in love."

"People like that woman make it clear just how asinine it is to believe that human beings have some kind of in-built universal sense of goodness. These days I think that everybody's just one spit away from being a mall bomber."

"Lists only spell out the things that can be taken away from us by moths and rust and thieves. If something is valuable, don't put it in a list. Don't even say the words."

"I was Cheryl Anway- that has to count for something."

"What surprises me about humanity is that in the end such a narrow range of plights defines our moral lives."

"I hear that God has a really bad haircut."

"The heart of a man is like deep water."

"People who advocate simplicity have money in the bank; the money came first, not the simplicity. (from inside the cover)"

"The only way to the top is killing and greed. Okay, I’m kidding. But killing helps."

"Don’t you get an empty feeling in your soul when you have a blank to-do list?"

"TV and the Internet are good because they keep stupid people from spending too much time out in public."

"Nobody has ever been happy in a job they obtained by first handing in a resumé."

"If you’re an incredibly famous rich person who does more in one day than I do in a month, does your perception of time’s passing go slower or faster than it does for me?"

"“I have this theory about smart people. If you’re smart, you’re either the only person in your family who’s smart, or everybody in the family is smart. No in-between.” I considered this. “I think I come from the everybody’s smart category. But they don’t apply their smarts to… larger picture pursuits. That includes me.”"

"“To be merely good enough is to never succeed.”"

"Ethan, there has to be more to my life than this." "Why can't you just be happy as a shallow cartoon glyph of a human like everybody else here?"

"I have an idea. … If Ethan and Mark are so similar, we might as well arbitrarily assign them distinct personality traits. I know—Mark, from here on, you're to be called 'Evil Mark.'"

"Just go and feed yourselves on a wide array of products containing high-fructose corn sugar. Zheesh." "That wasn't funny, Evil Mark. It sounded fake and hollow. You're terrible at being ironic, and you've been rehearsing that line, haven't you?"

"“You feel chilled because you have no character. You’re a depressing assemblage of pop culture influences and cancelled emotions, driven by the sputtering engine of only the most banal form of capitalism. You spend your life feeling as if you’re perpetually on the brink of being obsolete — whether it’s labour market obsolescence or cultural unhipness. And it’s all catching up with you. You live and die by the development cycle. You’re glamorized drosophila flies, with the company regulating your life cycles at whim. If it isn’t a budget-driven eighteen-month game production schedule, it’s a five-year hardware obsolescence schedule. Every five years you have to throw away everything you know and learn a whole new set of hardware and software specs, relegating what was once critical to our lives to the cosmic slag heap.”"

"As he ages and sees more of the world, he’s realizing that bad news is a part of life, and that when you have to give it, just say it and get it over with."

"Comics day came and went. Another shoes day came and went. And another comics day followed that — the typical production and consumption cycles that help us survice our dismal, meaningless little lives."

"Ethan is annoyed with all of these dumb campaigns that indoctrinate millions of people into thinking they’re tough-guy free spirits when, in fact, there’s probably much to be said for following and, in any event, the food chain isn’t structured to encompass millions of non-followers."

"If you can control your emotions, chances are you don’t have too many."

"Only damaged people want good things to happen to them through visualization. They want something for nothing."

"Is there anything in the world more annoyingly creepy than an unspoken dress code?"

"Chances are you feel superior to almost everyone you work with — however, they probably feel the same way about you."

"It can be really fun to go down with the ship."

"Here’s my theory about meetings and life: the three things you can’t fake are erections, competence and creativity. That’s why meetings become toxic — they put uncreative people in a situation in which they have to be something they can never be. And the more effort they put into concealing their inabilities, the more toxic the meeting becomes."

"“You have to admit, half the people who work here are mildly autistic; poor social skills, the ability to obsess on anything numerical or repetitive, the odd outfits, the paranoia and the sense of continually being judged and measured.”"

"“Why are we drinking Zima? It’s beyond irony. It’s not funny or anything. It’s just gross. Why not just serve us jugs of Hitler’s piss instead?” “Drinking Zima is something Douglas Coupland would make a character do.” “To what end?” “It’d be a device that would allow him to locate the characters in time and a specific sort of culture.”"

"Older staffers don’t even bother coming in on weekends. Where is the sleep-crazed, Pepsi-fuelled one-point-oh tech environment that can only be created by having no green vegetables, no sex and no life? Cowboy said, “I miss the greed of the 1990s bubble.” John Doe said, “I miss the possibility of unearned wealth.” Bree said, “I miss the possibility of doing something Apple, something one-point-oh.” Evil Mark said, “I miss people having Hot Wheels tracks set up in their cubicles.” Gord-O walked into the pod. “You can’t miss the nineties, because you weren’t there. They were great. Too bad you screwed-up twits missed out on the party.”"

"“A girl can’t control who will and who won’t fall in love with her, Ethan. And sometimes, when a nuisance person falls in love with you, it can be awfully… awkward.”"

"“I wish my parents took good care of their grow-op.”"

"“I was in a testy mood. I’d been inside my head all day — some days that just happens. You get lost doing just one task, and suddenly you look up and it’s dark out, but you still don’t want to leave your headspace, and the she comes up behind you with a 150 KHz marine emergency blow horn and lets off one big parp that has you shitting out your eyes, ears, and nostrils, and when you turn around, you discover that your evil co-workers were videoing the entire prank, and you get furious and you scream for everybody to fuck off and die. “Aw shucks, it was only a joke,” but the fact remains that because of that one loud parp you’ll never be able to parse C++ code again because you fried those dendrites that dictate logic patterns, and in a flash you see yourself as a future object of pity, forced to work at a TacoTime outlet, feeding disrespectful larvae of the middle classes while taking soiled orange PVC trash bags out to the back alley, where you see a grease storage drum, and wistfully remember that earlier, more charmed portion of your life when you once knew the chemicals and procedures necessary to convert restaurant grease into clean-burning planet-friendly ethanol, and that was just one of the many feats your brain was capable of, back before the parping, back before people whispered when they saw you walking their way, hoping they wouldn’t have to make small talk with you, back before they dumbed themselves down to the verbal level of Pebbles Flintstone to make you understand them."

"The problem is, after a week of intense googling, we’ve started to burn out on knowing the answer to everything. God must feel that way all the time. I think people in the year 2020 are going to be nostalgic for the sensation of feeling clueless."

"You know what? When you read a book, you’re totally lost in your own private world, and society says that’s a good and wonderful thing. But if you play a game by yourself, it’s this weird, fucked-up, socially damaging activity. In my neighbourhood, all the teenage boys are dying because they’re driving their cars using videogame physics instead of real-world physics. They turn too quickly and change lanes too quickly. They don’t understand traction or centripetal force. And they’re dropping like flies. Please stop putting quotes from Nietzsche at the end of your emails. Five years ago you were laughing your guts out over American Pie 2. What — suddenly you’ve magically turned into Noam Chomsky? Don’t discuss Sony like it’s a great big benevolent cartoon character who lives next door to Astro Boy. Like any company, Sony is comprised of individuals who are fearful for their jobs on a daily basis, and who make lame decisions based pretty much on fear and conforming to social norms — but then, that’s every corporation on earth, so don’t single out one specific corporation as lovable and cute. They’re all evil and greedy. They’re all sort of in the moral middle ground, where good and bad cancel each other out, so there’s nothing really there — which, in it’s own way, far darker than any paranoid or patriarchal theory of Sony. Here’s a much simpler example of geeks and neural processing malfunctions: Has anybody experienced a geek environment in which said geeks wear perfume or deodorant? Chances are no. While advanced microautistics are more commonly men than women, both share a marked dislike of scent."

"It turns out that only twenty percent of human beings have a sense of irony — which means that eighty percent of the world takes everything at face value. I can’t imagine anything worse than that. Okay, maybe I can, but imagine reading the morning newspaper and believing it all to be true on some level."

"You're never too old to dance, Dad...and you're never too old to dream." "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard you say. Were you saying that with irony or for real?"

"“What do lesbians have against capitalized letters?” “Capitalization implies a hierarchy, that some letters are more special than others.”"

"Hip flasks are the juice machines of the alcohol world — everyone has one and it never gets used."

"Let's go out and buy a statistically average meal from a large multinational restaurant chain. That usually fixes about seventy-five percent of life's problems."

"I was wondering what electrons are actually doing when they sit in your hard drive in an old laptop at the back of your closet. I mean, how does an electron sit still — is it like a cartoon M&M learning back in a folding beach chair? Is it like an angry little steel ball bearing hovering there, just waiting to go nuts on protons? What’s the mechanism that starts and stops the electron? Who’s its dungeon master?"

"Life is dull, but it could be worse and it could be better. We accept that a corporation determines our life’s routines. It’s the trade-off so that we don’t have to be chronically unemployed creative types, and we know it. When we were younger, we’d at least make a show of not being fooled and leave copies of Adbusters on our desktops. After a few years it just doesn’t matter. You trawl for jokes or amusingly diversionary .wav files. You download music. A new project comes along, then endures a slow-motion smothering at the hands of meetings. All ideas feel stillborn. The air smells like five hundred sheets of paper. And then it’s another day."

"Hang on a second—you already have my old laptop. Why do you want my new drives so badly?" "Because my contract says I have to write a book, and it's much easier just to steal your life than to make something up."

"Yesirree, life sure is good. Yesirree, nothing could possibly go wrong with everything being so good. But of course, in books, good is boring. Good is a snoozer. Good makes people close the covers and never reopen them. But you know—you'd think that just once when life finally started going my way, that cosmic writer out there would allow me and all of my co-characters to simply enjoy things for just a little while. I mean, what kind of a prick would end a book just when everything's going so well?"

"Now you young twerps want a new name for your generation? Probably not, you just want jobs, right? Well, the media might do us all such tremendous favours when they call you Generation X, right? Two clicks from the very end of the alphabet. I hereby declare you Generation A, as much as the beginning of a series of astonishing triumphs and failures as Adam and Eve were so long ago. -- Kurt Vonnegut, Syracuse University commencement address, May 8, 1994 [Source of the book's title]"

"Fame without the money to insulate you from it is one of the most wretched human conditions possible. (p. 80)"

"SOLON CR is indicated for the short-term treatment of psychological unease grounded in obsession with thinking about the near and distant future. By severing the link between the present moment and a patient’s perceived future state, researchers have found a pronounced and significant drop in all forms of anxiety. As well, researchers have found that disengagement with “the future” has allowed many patients complaining of persistent loneliness to live active and productive single lives with no fear or anxiety. (p. 95)"

"The hardest things in the world are being unique and having your life be a story. In the old days, it was much easier, but our modern fame-driven culture, with its real-time 24-7 marinade of electronic information, demands a lot from modern citizens, and poses great obstacles to narrative."

"Truly modern citizens are both charismatic and can only respond to other people with charisma. To survive, people need to become self-branding charisma robots. Yet, ironically, society mocks and punishes people who aspire to that state."

"There was a fifteen-second patch of silence, then Craig said, 'Isn't it weird that Hotmail accounts still exist?' 'It really is,' said Bev. (p. 222)"

"Finally, my life was a story. My days would no longer feel like a video game that resets to zero every time I wake up, and then begs for coins. (p. 143)"

"Being alive is just a brief technicality. (p. 167)"

"Why do most of us make such boring choices for the stories of our lives? How hard can it be to change gears and say, "You know what? Instead of inventing and telling stories, I’m going to make my life a more interesting story." (p. 177)"

"Doug's Law: "You can have information or you can have a life, but you can't have both.""

"We have to count. I want to be part of history. I want a Wikipedia page. I want Google hits. I don’t want to be just a living organism that comes and goes and leaves no trace on this planet."

"Unlike Rachel, Player One has a complete overview both of the world and of time. Player One’s life is more like a painting than it is a story. Player One can see everything with a glance and can change tenses at will. Player One has ultimate freedom, the ultimate software on the ultimate hardware. That realm is also the one place where Player One feels, for lack of a better word, normal."

"Our curse as humans is that we are trapped in time; our curse is that we are forced to interpret life as a series of events — a story — and when we can’t figure out what our particular story is, we feel lost somehow."

"Life need not be a story, but it does need to be an adventure."

"Most know Coupland as the coiner of “Generation X,” a place-holder of a generational handle that we GenX’ers were too apathetic/jaded to swap out, thus proving the moniker’s point. But the Canadian Coupland is much more than that – he’s an artist, a prolific novelist, and has been a keen observer of what is happening to us for a good three decades."

"In his (now deeply underrated) novel Generation X, Douglas Coupland sets the action against the background of a vast desert, mile after mile of emptiness, a hard stop, the ends of the earth. So hard, to feel trapped between having everything ahead of you and nowhere to go."

"... idea of what books and literature are for ... serious fiction ... It is for people who may be a little isolated ... may be isolated by the very fact that they like to read books. And that my job really is to participate in that community and make that human connection. So, I went from trying to impress people or change them ... to just trying to make that connection."

"... The struggle to rein in s and keep the planet from melting down has the feel of Kafka’s fiction. The goal has been clear for thirty years, and despite earnest efforts we’ve made essentially no progress toward reaching it. Today, the scientific evidence verges on irrefutable. If you’re younger than sixty, you have a good chance of witnessing the radical destabilization of life on earth—massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought. If you’re under thirty, you’re all but guaranteed to witness it. If you care about the planet, and about the people and animals who live on it, there are two ways to think about this. You can keep on hoping that catastrophe is preventable, and feel ever more frustrated or enraged by the world’s inaction. Or you can accept that disaster is coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope."

"Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it's just not permanent enough. ...it's going to be very hard to make the world work if there's no permanence like that. That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government."

"One of the consolations of dying... Seriously, the world is changing so quickly that if you had any more than 80 years of change I don't see how you could stand it psychologically."

"Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular."

"An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970."

"Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists."

"A lack of desire to spend money becomes a symptom of disease that requires expensive medication. Which medication then destroys the libido, in other words destroys the appetite for the one pleasure in life that's free, which means the person has to spend even more money on compensatory pleasures. The very definition of mental 'health' is the ability to participate in the consumer economy. When you buy into therapy, you're buying into buying."

"Nobody can ever quite say what's wrong exactly. But they all know it's evil. They all know 'corporate' is a dirty word. And if somebody's having fun or getting rich - disgusting! Evil! And it's always the death of this and the death of that. And people who think they're free aren't 'really' free. And people who think they're happy aren't 'really' happy. And it's impossible to radically critique society anymore, although what's so radically wrong with society that we need such a radical critique, nobody can say exactly.... Here things are getting better and better for women and people of color, and gay men and lesbians, more and more integrated and open, and all you can think about is some stupid, lame problem with signifiers and signifieds."

"In the years when he'd worked full-time, he'd never complained about frozen or takeout or preprepared dinners. To Caroline it probably seemed that he was changing the rules on her. But to Gary it seemed that the nature of family life itself was changing - that togetherness and filiality and fraternity weren't valued the way they were when he was young."

"All around him, millions of newly minted American millionaires were engaged in the identical pursuit of feeling extraordinary - of buying the perfect Victorian, of skiing the virgin slope, of knowing the chef personally, of locating the beach that had no footprints. There were further tens of millions of young Americans who didn't have money but were nonetheless chasing the Perfect Cool. And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary? Who would perform the thankless work of being comparatively uncool?"

"The taste of self-inflicted suffering, of an evening trashed in spite, brought curious satisfactions. Other people stopped being real enough to carry blame for how you felt. Only you and your refusal remained. And like self-pity, or like the blood that filled your mouth when a tooth was pulled - the salty ferric juices that you swallowed and allowed yourself to savor - refusal had a flavor for which a taste could be acquired."

"'It's who I am. Put somebody else's comfort ahead of my own? Go hop in a toilet to spare somebody else's feelings? That's the kinda thing you do, fella. You got everything bass ackwards. And look where it's landed you.' 'Other people ought to have more consideration.' 'You oughtta have less. Me personally, I am opposed to all strictures. If you feel it, let it rip. If you want it, go for it. Dude's gotta put his own interests first.'"

"'What's your impression of the ship so far?' she asked. 'Is it really super authentic?' 'Well, it does seem to be floating,' Mr Söderblad said with a smile, 'in spite of heavy seas.' Enid raised her voice to aid his comprehension. 'I mean, is it AUTHENTICALLY SCANDINAVIAN?' 'Well, yes, of course," Mr. Söderblad said. 'At the same time, everything in the world is more and more American, don't you think?'"

"Life, in her experience, had a kind of velvet luster. You looked at yourself from one perspective and all you saw was weirdness. Move your head a little bit, though, and everything looked reasonably normal. She believed she couldn't hurt anybody as long as she was only working."

"‘I’m not the person to ask about what’s normal,’ Denise answered. ‘I’ve mainly seen normal in the rearview mirror.’"

"It offended his sense of proportion and economy to throw away a ninety-percent serviceable string of lights. It offended his sense of himself, because he was an individual from an age of individuals, and a string of lights was, like him, an individual thing. No matter how little the thing had cost, to throw it away was to deny its value and, by extension, the value of individuals generally: to willfully designate as trash an object that you knew wasn't trash."

"There are only two races on this planet — the intelligent and the stupid."

"When she was home from her boarding-school I used to see her almost every day sometimes, because their house was right opposite the Town Hall Annexe. She and her younger sister used to go in and out a lot, often with young men, which of course I didn’t like. When I had a free moment from the files and ledgers I stood by the window and used to look down over the road over the frosting and sometimes I’d see her. In the evening I marked it in my observations diary, at first with X, and then when I knew her name with M."

"Well, then there was the bit in the local paper about the scholarship she’d won and how clever she was, and her name as beautiful as herself, Miranda. So I knew she was up in London studying art. It really made a difference, that newspaper article. It seemed like we became more intimate, although of course we still did not know each other in the ordinary way. I can’t say what it was, the very first time I saw her, I knew she was the only one. Of course I am not mad, I knew it was just a dream and it always would have been if it hadn’t been for the money. I used to have daydreams about her, I used to think of stories where I met her, did things she admired, married her and all that. Nothing nasty, that was never until what I’ll explain later."

"I know what I am to him. A butterfly he has always wanted to catch. I remember (the very first time I met him) G.P. saying that collectors were the worst animals of all. He meant art collectors, of course. I didn’t really understand, I thought he was just trying to shock Caroline — and me. But of course, he is right. They’re anti-life, anti-art, anti-everything."

"He’s so slow, so unimaginative, so lifeless. Like zinc white. I see it’s a sort of tyranny he has over me. He forces me to be changeable, to act. To show off. The hateful tyranny of weak people."

"Everything free and decent in life is being locked away in filthy little cellars by beastly people who don’t care."

"I don’t think the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament has much chance of actually affecting the government. It’s one of the first things you have to face up to. But we do it to keep our self-respect to show to ourselves, each one to himself or herself, that we care. And to let other people, all the lazy, sulky, hopeless ones like you, know that someone cares. We’re trying to shame you into thinking about it, about acting."

"Most marriages recognize this paradox: Passion destroys passion; we want what puts an end to wanting what we want."

"...even more ominous … is the fact that since the Second World War a new kind of intellectual has emerged in large numbers. … he is only minimally interested in the proper intellectual significance of images and objects. Such people are not really intellectuals, but visuals … A visual is more interested in style than in content … A visual does not feel a rioting crowd being machine-gunned by the police, he simply sees a brilliant news photograph."

"The artefacts of a genius are distinguished by rich human content, for which he forges new images and new techniques, creates new styles. He sees himself as a unique eruption in the desert of the banal. He feels himself mysteriously inspired or possessed. The craftsman, on the other hand, is content to use the traditional materials and techniques. The more self-possessed he is, the better craftsman he will be. What pleases him is skill of execution. He is very concerned with his contemporary success, his market value. If a certain kind of political commitment is fashionable, he may be committed; but out of fashion, not conviction. The genius, of course, is largely indifferent to contemporary success; and his commitment to his ideals, both artistic and political, is profoundly, Byronically, indifferent to their contemporary popularity."

"Since the advent of atomic weapons it is clear that what matters militarily is not numbers but know-how; this situation was apparent as soon as the first machine gun was invented."

"Even if we could feed a population twice the size of the present world population, and feed them better than they are fed now, there is no guarantee that such an overpopulated world would be happier than a properly populated one....the state of overpopulation turns progress into regress."

"There’s a card in the Tarot pack called The Magus. The magician, conjuror. Two of his traditional symbols are the lily and the rose."

"A novelist has to enter deeper exile still. In most outward ways the experience was depressive, as many young would-be writers and painters who have ever gone to Greece have discovered. We used to have a nickname for the sense of inadequacy and accidie it produced – the ‘Aegean blues’. One has to be a very complete artist to create good work among the purest and most balanced landscapes on the planet…The Greece of the Islands is Circe still; no place for the artist-voyager to linger long, if he cares for his soul."

"Years later I saw the gabbia at Piacenza; a harsh black canary-cage strung up high the side of the the towering campanile, in which prisoners were once left to starve to death and rot in full view of the town below. And looking up at it, I remembered that winter in Greece, that Gabbia I had constructed for myself out of light, solitude and self-delusions. My feelings at the end of that wretched term, were those of a man who knows he is in a cage, exposed to the jeers of all his old ambitions until he dies."

"I do not defend Conchis’ decision at the execution, but I defend the reality of the dilemma. God and freedom are totally anti-pathetic concepts; and men believe in their imaginary gods most often because they are afraid to believe in the other thing. I am old enough to realise now that they do sometimes with good reason. True freedom lies between each two, never in one alone, and therefore is never absolute freedom."

"If there was some central theme beneath the (more Irish than Greek) stew of intuitions about the nature of human existence – and of fiction – it is perhaps in the alternative title, whose rejection I still sometimes regret: The Godgame. I did intend Conchis to exhibit a series of masks representing human notions of God, from the supernatural to the jargon-ridden scientific, that is, a series of human illusions about something that does not exist in fact, absolute knowledge and absolute power. The destruction of such illusions seems to me still an eminently humanist aim; and I wish there were some super-Conchis who could put the Arabs and the Israelis, or the Ulster Catholics and Protestants, through the same heuristic mill as Nicholas."

"It must essentially remain a novel of adolescence written by a retarded adolescent."

"If a person is intelligent, then of course he is either an agnostic or an atheist. Just as he is a physical coward. They are automatic definitions of high intelligence."

"Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical."

"That is the truth. Not the hammer and sickle. Not the stars and stripes. Not the cross. Not the sun. Not gold. Not yin and yang. But the smile."

"The mess of my life, the selfishnesses and false turnings and the treacheries, all these things could fall into place, they could become a source of construction rather than a source of chaos, and precisely because I had no other choice."

"By this sinister elision, this slipping from true remorse, the belief that the suffering we have precipitated ought to ennoble us, or at least make us less ignoble from then on, to disguised self-forgiveness, the belief that suffering in some way ennobles life, so that the precipitation of pain comes, by such a cockneyed algebra, to equal the ennoblement, or at any rate the enrichment, of life, by this characteristically twentieth-century retreat from content into form, from meaning into appearance, from ethics into aesthetics, from aqua into unda, I dulled the pain of that accusing death; and hardened myself, to say nothing of it at Bourani. I was still determined to tell Julie, but at the right time and place, when the exchange rate between confession and the sympathy it evoked looked very likely to be high."

"She turned to look at him — or as it seemed to Charles, through him. It was not so much what was positively in that face which remained with him after that first meeting, but all that was not as he had expected; for theirs was an age when the favoured feminine look was the demure, the obedient, the shy. Charles felt immediately as if he had trespassed; as if the Cobb belonged to that face, and not to the Ancient Borough of Lyme. It was not a pretty face like Ernestina's. It was certainly not a beautiful face, by any period's standard or taste. But it was an unforgettable face, and a tragic face. Its sorrow welled out of it as purely, naturally and unstoppably as water out of a woodland spring. There was no artifice there, no hypocrisy, no hysteria, no mask; and above all, no sign of madness. The madness was in the empty sea, the empty horizon, the lack of reason for such sorrow; as if the spring was natural in itself, but unnatural in welling from a desert."

"There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist."

"Darwinism, as its shrewder opponents realized, let open the floodgates to something far more serious than the undermining of the Biblical account of the origins of man; its deepest implications lay in the direction of determinism and behaviourism, that is, towards philosophies that reduce morality to a hypocrisy and duty to a straw hut in a hurricane."

"Sometimes I almost pity them [other women]. I think I have a freedom they cannot understand. No insult, no blame, can touch me. Because I have set myself beyond the pale. I am nothing. I am hardly human any more. I am the French Lieutenant's Whore."

"In a vivid Insight, a flash of black lightning, he [Charles] saw that all life was parallel: that evolution was not vertical, ascending to a perfection, but horizontal. Time was the great fallacy; existence was without history, was always now, was always this being caught in the same fiendish machine. All those painted screens erected by man to shut out reality — history, religion, duty, social position, all were illusions, mere opium fantasies."

"For a moment, in that dark Dorset night, reason and science dissolved; life was a dark machine, a sinister astrology, a verdict at birth and without appeal, a zero over all."

"A tiny wren perched on top of a bramble not ten feet from him and trilled its violent song. He saw its glittering black eyes, the red and yellow of its song-gaped throat — a midget ball of feathers that yet managed to make itself the Announcing Angel of evolution: I am that I am, thou shalt not pass my being now. He stood as Pisanello's saint stood, astonished perhaps more at his own astonishment at this world's existing so close, so within reach of all that suffocating banality of ordinary day. In those few moments of defiant song, any ordinary hour or place — and therefore the vast infinity of all Charles's previous hours and places — seemed vulgarized, coarsened, made garish. The appallimg ennui of human reality lay cleft to the core; and the heart of all life pulsed there in the wren's triumphant throat."

"I am infinitely strange to myself."

"That's all. Just paint. That's my advice. Leave the clever talk to the poor sods who can't."

"The princess calls, but there is no one, now, to hear her."

"The tender pragmatisms of flesh have poetries no enigma, human or divine, can diminish or demean - indeed, it can only cause them, and then walk out."

"I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria."

"Narcissism: when one grows too old to believe in one's uniqueness, one falls in love with one's complexity."

"He liked to be popular and in place of charm had to dispense alcohol…"

"(The staff common room) was real boredom, not just modish ennui. Boredom, the numbing annual predictability of life, hung over the staff like a cloud. From it flowed cant, hypocrisy, and the impotent rage of the old who know they have failed and the young who suspect they will fail. The senior masters stood like Gallows sermons; with some of them one had a sort of vertigo, a glimpse of the bottomless pit of human futility...a sere notifier of what is."

"I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope – an impotence, in short and to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all..."

"I didn’t know at that time Emily Dickinson’s great definition, her 'Publication is not the business of poets’; being a poet is all, being known as a poet is nothing."

"I was not a poet. I felt no consolation in this knowledge, but only a red anger that evolution could allow such sensitivity and such inadequacy to coexist in the same mind. In one ego, my ego, screaming like a hare caught in a gin."

"One kind of person is engaged in society without realizing it; another kind engages in society by controlling it. The one is a gear, a cog, and the other an engineer, a driver. But a person who has opted out has only his ability to express his disengagement between his existence and nothingness. Not cogito, but scribo, ergo sum."

"I hated myself. I had created nothing, I belonged to nothingness, to the néant, and it seemed to me that my own death was the only thing that I could create; and still, even then, I thought it might accuse everyone who had ever known me. It would validate all my cynicism, it would prove all my solitary selfishness; it would stand, and be remembered, as a final dark victory."

"All the time I felt I was being watched, that I was not alone, that I was putting on an act for the benefit of someone, that this action could be done only if it was spontaneous, pure – and moral. Because more and more it crept through my mind with the chill spring night that I was trying to commit not a moral action, but a fundamentally aesthetic one; to do something that would end my life sensationally, significantly, consistently. It was a Mercutio death I was looking for, not a real one. A death to be remembered, not the true death of a true suicide, the death obliterate."

"I saw that I was from now on, for ever, contemptible. I had been and remained, intensely depressed, but I had also been, and always would be, intensely false; in existentialist terms, inauthentic. I knew I would never kill myself, I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased."

"Her voice was completely English. For some reason I had expected a foreign accent; but I could place this exactly. It was my own; product of boarding school, university, the accent of what a sociologist once called the Dominant Hundred Thousand."

"We were equally tired, in mid-century, of cold sanity and hot blasphemy; of the over-cerebral and of the over-faecal; the way out lay somewhere else. Words had lost their power, either for good or for evil; still hung, like a mist, over the reality of action, distorting, misleading, castrating; but at least since Hitler and Hiroshima they were seen to be a mist, a flimsy superstructure."

"The battle was over. Our casualties were some thirteen thousand killed--thirteen thousand minds, memories, loves, sensations, worlds, universes--because the human mind is more a universe than the universe itself--and all for a few hundred yards of useless mud."

"I saw that this cataclysm must be an expiation for some barbarous crime of civilisation, some terrible human lie. What the lie was, I had too little knowledge of history to know then. I now know it was our believing that we were fulfilling some end, serving some plan, - that all would come out well in the end, because there was some great plan over all. Instead of the reality. There is no plan. All is hazard. And the only thing that will preserve us is ourselves."

"If you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did."

"There are people who have an instinctive yet perfect moral judgment, who can perform the most complex ethical calculations like an Indian peasant can sometimes perform astounding mathematical feats in a matter of seconds. Lily was such a person. I craved her approval."

"I am talking about the general psychological health of the species, man. He needs the existence of mysteries, not their solution."

"She seemed older to me, over-experienced by travel; needing to be learnt again, and I hadn’t the energy."

"She had a kind of genius for picking the wrong man. She always looked for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole romantic kitchen, whereas I lived by a simpler diet, prose and pudding. I don’t expect attractive men to have attractive souls."

"The writing was impeccably neat and legible though rather crabbed into the centre of the page; I saw a neat crabbed man behind it. Presumably some sort of retreat, one of those desiccated young Catholics that used to mince around Oxford when I was an undergraduate."

"The dinner that evening was dreadful, the epitome of English vacuity...they were all the same, each mind set in the same weird armour, like an archosaur’s ruff, like a fringe of icicles. All I heard the whole evening was the tinkle of broken ice-needles as people tried timidly and vainly to reach through the stale fence of words, tinkle, tinkle, and then withdraw. Nobody behaved with breadth, with warmth, with naturalness, and finally it became pathetic. We were all the same; I hardly said anything, but that made me no more innocent – or less conditioned. The solemn figures of the Old Country, the Queen, the Public School, Oxbridge, the Right Accent, People Like Us, stood around the table like secret police, ready to crush down in an instant on any attempt at an intelligent European humanity.* We…were held by those cloud-grey shapes on the world’s blue rim. Death machines holding thousands of gum-chewing, contraceptive-carrying men; for some reason more 30 years away than 30 miles; as if we were looking into the future, not the south; into a world where there were no more Prosperos, no private domains, no Poetries, fantasies, tender sexual promises...I felt acutely the fragility of time itself..."

"Perhaps the clue lay in indispensibility. I was being taught some obscure metaphysical lesson about the place of man in existence, about the limitations of the egocentric view..."

"It. Is. Not. Ended. There was just the trace of a humourless smile on his face; and more than a trace of menace. As if he meant something more than that there was a sequel to this scene; but that the whole Nazi weltanschaaung to be, resurrected and realised. He was an impressively iron man..."

"To my horror I began to cry...a great cloud of black guilt, knowledge of my atrocious selfishness, settled on me. One day she had said “when you love me (and she had not meant ‘make love to me’) it’s as if God forgave me for being the mess I am”; and I took it as chicanery, another emotional blackmail, to make me feel essential and give me a sense of responsibility towards her...My monstrous crime was Adam’s, the oldest and most vicious of all – male selfishness...Something far worse than lèse majesté. Lèse-humanité."

"You sound like a certain kind of surgeon. A lot more interested in the operation than the patient." "I should not be in the hands of a surgeon who did not take that view."

"All good science is art. And all good art is science."

"I played him the Goldberg Variations. If one wishes to reduce a sensitive German to tears there is no surer lachrymatory."

"I did not like the colonel at all. He had eyes like razors…the eyes of a machine. An educated machine… I realised he was drinking less than we were…And that he was playing with me. That he was a realist… Also that Anton was careless with his tongue..."

"There was a bright wind, it was a Dufy day, all bustle, movement, animated colour.."

"Once again fear, and mystery, swept over me...I was infinitely far from home. The profoundest distances are never geographical..."

"Hypotheses pinned me down, as Gulliver was pinned by the countless threads of the Lilliputians..."

"So I strode down to the school like some vengence-brewing chieftain in an Icelandic saga..."

"Though not large it had a certain elegance; a pilastered portico, windows with graceful pediments. The whitewashed façade was in shadow, a palid blue against the evening sky’s pale blue."

"I still couldn’t accept that this was not some nightmare, like some freak misbinding in a book, a Lawrence novel become, at the turn of a page, one by Kafka."

"I felt both a state of envy and contempt. The yacht itself was not vulgar, but I smelt something vulgar about owning it...A few moments later I set off back to my dull daily penal colony of an existence on the far side of the dream, as Adam left the Garden of Eden perhaps…except I knew there were no Gods, and nothing was going to bar my return..."

"Pois eisai? She wanted to know. Pou pas? The old Homeric questions of the Greek peasant. Who art thou? Where goest thou?"

"By this characteristically twentieth century retreat from content into form, from meaning into appearance, from ethics into aesthetics, from aqua into unda, I dulled the pain of accusing death, and hardened myself."

"Utram bibis? Aquam an undam?"

"And we will be ready, at the end of every day will be ready, will not say no to anything, will try to stay awake while everyone is sleeping, will not sleep, will make the shoes with the elves, will breathe deeply all the time, breathe in all the air full of glass and nails and blood, will breathe it and drink it, so rich, so when it comes we will not be angry, will be content, tired enough to go, gratefully, will shake hands with everyone, bye, bye, and then pack a bag, some snacks, and go to the volcano."

"First of all: I am tired. I am true of heart! And also: You are tired. You are true of heart!"

"Matter of fact, the first three or four chapters are all some of you might want to bother with. That gets you to page 123 or so, which is a nice length, a nice novella sort of length."

"‘Listen John—’ ‘Who’s John?’ ‘You’re John.’ ‘I’m John?’ ‘Yeah, I changed your name.’"

"I am sorry Chris is late this morning. I could make something up about an appointment or a sickness, but the fact is that we woke up late. Go figure Best, Brother of Toph."

"Ooh, look at me, I’m Dave, I’m writing a book! With all my thoughts in it. La la la!"

". . . I’ll raise my arms and give you my chest and throat and wait, and I’ve been so old for so long for you, for you, I want it fast and right through me— Oh do it, do it you motherfuckers do it you fuckers finally, finally, finally."

"We’re best at the long high throws. Like when you take four or five steps and rip it— It’s almost like a shotput approach, the steps, four or five quick, one over the other, kind of sideways-like—and then you slash away with that fucker, it’s such a violent act, throwing that white thing, you’re first cradling it to your breast and then you whip that fucker as hard as you can while keeping it level, keeping it straight, but otherwise with everything you can send with it you whip that fucker like it had blades on it and you wanted it to cut straight through the paperblue sky like a screen, rip through it and have it be blood and back space beyond."

"We cannot fathom why people would stand across the street, easily a hundred feet away, when they could be so close, near us. ‘Suckers.’ I tell Toph, thumbing toward those watching from so far away. It is important, I feel, that the boy knows what suckers look like.”"

"Toph does not know the words, and I know few of the words, but you cannot fucking stop us from singing"

"— Mr. Churchill you were given a mission. — Yes — I want to have been given your mission. I want your place in world events, the centrality of it. You were born in the cradle of a catapult! — You are wrong. I found my mission. — I disagree. — If you must. — Tell me: where is my mission? Where are my bunkers and trenches, my goddamn Gallipoli?"

"Hand took a breath and opened his palms, as if accepting the gift of rain. "YOU SHALL KNOW OUR VELOCITY!" he bellowed into the cold exhausted city."

"There are people who meet strangers and people, like me, who know only those they’ve known from birth"

"I was feeling everything too much. Everything was pulling at my eyes."

"We’d have a motherfucking shitload of dogs! Horses. Peacocks. Oh to live among peacocks. I’d seen them once in person and they defied so many laws of color and gravity that they had to be made geniuses waiting to take over everything."

"I was a looker someone who looked over at every car at every traffic light, hoping something would happen, and almost never finding anyone looking back- always everyone looking forward, and every time I felt stupid. Why should people look over at you? Why would they care?"

"But that in any city, in any cluster of people, there a few people who are awake at this hour, who are both awake and dancing, and it’s here that we need to be. That if we are living as we were this week, that we had to be awake with the people who are still dancing."

"We sleep when we fall. We only sleep when we can’t move anymore. That’s juvenile. But it means everything. It’s the illusion of progress. Staying awake isn’t progress. The illusion is enough."

"When we pass by another person without telling them we love them it’s cruel and wrong and we all know this."

"What did we want? We want the world smaller and bigger and just the same but advancing. We don’t know what we want."

"What are we allowed to do when we’re looking for things we’re required to do?"

"The pain is not great. But the symbolism is disagreeable."

"Humans are divided between those who can still look through the eyes of youth and those who cannot. Though it causes me frequent pain, I find it very easy to place myself in the shoes of almost any boy, and can conjure my own youth with an ease that is troublesome."

"I cannot count the times I have cursed our lack of urgency. If I ever love again, I will not wait to love as best as I can. We thought we were young and that there would be time to love well sometime in the future. This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love."

"I speak to these people, and I speak to you because I cannot help it. It gives me strength, almost unbelievable strength, to know that you are there. I covet your eyes, your ears, the collapsible space between us. How blessed are we to have each other? I am alive and you are alive so we must fill the air with our words. I will fill today, tomorrow, every day until I am taken back to God. I will tell stories to people who will listen and to people who don’t want to listen, to people who seek me out and to those who run. All the while I will know that you are there. How can I pretend that you do not exist? It would be almost as impossible as you pretending that I do not exist."

"It's not that I'm not social. I'm social enough. But the tools you guys create actually manufacture unnaturally extreme social needs. No one needs the level of contact you're purveying. It improves nothing. It's not nourishing. It's like snack food. You know how they engineer this food? They scientifically determine precisely how much salt and fat they need to include to keep you eating. You're not hungry, you don't need the food, it does nothing for you, but you keep eating these empty calories. This is what you're pushing. Same thing. Endless empty calories, but the digital-social equivalent. And you calibrate it so it's equally addictive."

"If there's a locked door, I start to make up all kinds of stories about what might be behind it. I feel like it's some kind of secret, and it leads to me making up lies. But if all the doors are open, physically and metaphorically, there's only the one truth."

"It was selfish and nothing more. The same way a child doesn't want to share her favorite toy. I understand that secrecy is part of, well, an aberrant behavior system. It comes from a bad place, not a place of light and generosity. And when you deprive your friends, or someone like your son Gunner, of experiences like I had, you're basically stealing from them. You're depriving them of something they have a right to. Knowledge is a basic human right. Equal access to all possible human experience is a basic human right."

"I understand that we're obligated, as humans, to share what we see and know. And that all knowledge must be democratically accessible." "It's the natural state of information to be free."

"SECRETS ARE LIES SHARING IS CARING PRIVACY IS THEFT"

"What would transparency be if we could delete anything we felt was embarrassing in some way? You know we don't delete."

"When everything is known, everything acceptable will be accepted."

"You and yours at the Circle, you're gonna save all the souls. You're gonna get everyone in one place, you're gonna teach them all the same things. There can only be one morality, one set of rules. Imagine! Now all humans will have the eyes of God. You know this passage? 'All things are naked and opened unto the eyes of God.' Something like that. You know your Bible? Now we're all God. Every one of us will soon be able to see, and cast judgment upon, every other. We'll see what He sees. We'll articulate His judgment. We'll channel His wrath and deliver His forgiveness. On a constant and global level. All religion has been waiting for this, when every human is a direct and immediate messenger of God's will. Do you see what I'm saying?"

"Openness is all, she thought. Truth was its own reward."

"It was not knowing that was the seed of madness, loneliness, fear. But there were ways to solve all this. Clarity had made her knowable to the world, and had made her better, had brought her close, she hoped, to perfection. Now the world would follow. Full transparency would bring full access, and there would be no more not-knowing. Mae smiled, thinking about how simple it all was, how pure. Bailey shared her smile."

"Don't you see that's just one of the consequences of all this? There will be more Mercers. So many more. So many people who do't want to be found but who will be. So any people who wanted no part of all this. That's what's new. There used to be the option of opting out. But now that's over. Completion is the end. We're closing the circle around everyone - it's a totalitarian nightmare."

"I want you to connect these dots and see if you see what I see. Picture this. The Circle has been devouring all competitors for years, correct? It only makes the company stronger. Already 90 percent of the world's searches go through the Circle. Without competitors, this will increase. Soon it'll be nearly 100 percent. Now, you and I both know that if you can control the flow of information, you can control everything. You can control most of what anyone sees and knows. If you want to bury some piece of information, permanently, that's two seconds' work. If you want to ruin anyone, that's five minutes' work. How can anyone rise up against the Circle if they control all the information and access to it? They want everyone to have a Circle account, and they're well on their way to making it illegal not to. What happens then? What happens when they control all searches, and have full access to all data about every person? When they know every move everyone makes? When all monetary transactions, all health and DNA information, every piece of one's life, good or bad, when every word uttered flows through one channel?"

"Under the guise of having every voice heard, you create mob rule, a filterless society where secrets are crimes."

"Most people would trade everything they know, everyone they know - they'd trade it all to know they've been seen, and acknowledged, that they might even be remembered/ We all know we die. We all know the world is too big for us to be significant. So all we have is the hope of being seen, or heard, even for a moment."

"There is no simple way to say this."

"I want to say I may have seen my son die this morning."

"I was just telling my students about first reading D. H. Lawrence and having that feeling: it is done, I need not do more or attempt to... I would have to say – and this is less hubris, I swear, than a humble recognition from what others say about reading my work – that I have a way of shaping the experience of the text so that it becomes like a maze of mirrors set at angles to each other, not a funhouse labyrinth exactly nor the mirror in mirror, but rather an angularity wherein the mirror mirrors the blue opening as well as the opposing surface so that surface and opening multiply and intertwine."

""Hypertext is a representation of the text which escapes and surprises by turns," I wrote. Given the pure unaccountability (it is literally impossible to read all the possible variations of a richly linked hypertext) a hyperfiction writer is always attuned to "how the reader will interpret the literature presented" since its presentation shifts and flows in its composition as well."

"In our online descriptions and program literature we describe the cloisters as a public sphere for networked interaction, the gathering place for students, professors, and librarians engaged in planning, evaluating, or reviewing the efforts of research and study utilizing the whole range of technologies of literacy. We go further and describe the task of the cloisters as to "channel flows of research, learning and teaching between the increasingly networked world of the library and the intimacy and engagement of our classrooms and other campus spaces". There we continue to explore the "collectible object", which I tentatively described in Othermindedness in terms of maintaining an archive of "the successive choices, the errors and losses, of our own human community" and suggesting that what constitutes the collectible object is the value which suffuses our choices. It seemed to me then that electronic media are especially suited to tracking such "changing change". I think it still seems so to me now but I do fear we have lost track of the beauty and nimbleness of new media in representing and preserving the meaning-making quotidian, the ordinary mindfulness which makes human life possible and valuable. It is interesting, I think, that recounting and rehearsing this notion leaves this interview layered and speckled with (self) quotations, documentations, implicit genealogies, images, and traditions of continuity, change, and difference. Perhaps the most quoted line of afternoon over the years has been the sentence "There is no simple way to say this." The same is true of any attempt to describe the way in which the collectible object participates in (I use this word as a felicitous shorthand for the complex of ideas involved in what I called "representing and preserving the meaning-making quotidian" above) the library as living archive."

"I read Hemingway's posthumous Paris memoirs, rumoured to have been written by his wife (`Out of the question,' Toni assured me, `they're so badly written they must be authentic')."

"You need one of those slave-driving old studio bosses if you ask me, not a sensitive graduate who went into movies because he liked the clouds in Antonioni and then turned himself into a nouvelle vague Deutscher all hot for Truthspiel."

"Now, Stuart, as you will discover if you have not done so already, believes that the principal raison d'etre of food is to conceal from public view the hideous pattern on the plate beneath."

"This is I have to admit, one murky compartment of the female psyche which has yet to benefit from the oven-scourer of Reason."

"All we can ever do is lay a word in the hands of those who have put one in ours."

"Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual sense of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtle than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery."

"What he had done, how he had chosen to spend his energies, really was science. A way of looking, reverencing. And the purpose of all science, like living, which amounts to the same thing, was not the accumulations of Gnostic power, fixing of formulas for the names of God, stockpiling brutal efficiency, accomplishing the sadistic myth of progress. the purpose of science was to revive and cultivate a perpetual state of wonder. For nothing deserved wonder so much as our capacity to feel it."

"Human beings do not live forever, Reuven. We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much, if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye?...I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing; but the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing; but the man who lives the span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant. A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life. It is hard work to fill one's life with meaning- that, I do not think you understand yet. A life filled with meaning is worthy of rest. I want to be worthy of rest when I am no longer here."

"I went away and cried to the Master of the Universe, "What have you done to me? A mind like this I need for a son? A heart I need for a son, a soul I need for a son, compassion I want from my son, righteousness, mercy, strength to suffer and carry pain, that I want from my son, not a mind without a soul!""

"Reuven, as you grow older you will discover that the most important things that will happen to you will often come as a result of silly things, as you call them— "ordinary things" is a better expression. That is the way the world is."

"You can listen to silence, Reuven. I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and dimension all its own."

"I don't understand why I wanted to kill you."

"It is never pleasant to be a buffer, Reuven."

"It was senseless, as— I held my breath, feeling myself shiver with fear— as Billy's blindness was senseless."

"[Danny] laughed once and said, 'That man is such an ignoramus, Father.' I was angry. 'Look into his soul,' I said. 'Stand inside his soul and see the world through his eyes. You will know the pain he feels because of his ignorance, and you will not laugh.' He was bewildered and hurt. The nightmares he began to have. . . . But he learned to find answers for himself. He suffered and learned to listen to the suffering of others. In the silence between us, he began to hear the world crying.""

"“I loathe interviews and getting me to sit still for a whole day is unprecedented.”"

"“Place and history are central to the fiction I write, both in the broad, general sense and in detailed particulars. Rural North America, regional cultures in critical economic flux, the images of an ideal and seemingly attainable world the characters cherish in their long views despite the rigid and difficult circumstances of their place and time. Those things interest me and are what I write about. I watch for the historical skew between what people have hoped for and who they thought they were and what befell them.”"

"“The construction of short stories calls for a markedly different set of mind than work on a novel, and for me short stories are at once more interesting and more difficult to write than longer work. The comparative brevity of the story dictates more economical and accurate use of words and images, a limited palette of events, fewer characters, tighter dialogue, strong title and punctuation that works to move the story forward. If the writer is trying to illustrate a particular period or place, a collection of short stories is a good way to take the reader inside a house of windows, each opening onto different but related views—a kind of flip book of place, time and manners.”"

"“Where a story begins in the mind I am not sure—a memory of haystacks, maybe, or wheel ruts in the ruined stone, the ironies that fall out of the friction between past and present, some casual phrase overheard. But something kicks in, some powerful juxtaposition, and the whole book shapes itself up in the mind…”"

"“It’s kind of an old-fashioned book…It’s long; it has a lot of characters; it takes a big theme. It isn’t a navel-staring, dysfunctional-family thing that’s so beloved of most American writers. It’s different, but I think people probably miss those books that were written some time ago – the big book that was written with care.”"

"“I don’t think I was a particularly good or diligent mother. It took a long time for the obvious to become obvious: I could not operate in a conventional family.”"

"“This has always bothered me, the division: as though there was something about women who write that is very different.”"

"“I have never fallen in love with one of my characters. The notion is repugnant. Characters are made to carry a particular story; that is their work. The only reason one shapes a character to look as he or she does, behave and speak in a certain way, suffer particular events, is to move the story forward in a particular direction. I do not indulge characters nor give them their heads and “see where they go,” and I don’t understand writers who drift downriver in company with unformed characters…”"

"In every life there are events that reshape one's sense of existence. Afterward, all is different and the past is dimmed."

"As he cut, the wildness of the world receded, the vast invisible web of filaments that connected human life to animals, trees to flesh and bones to grass shivered as each tree fell and one by one the web strands snapped."

"Deiter felt himself too old, lost in the forest of his own experience."

"That world he wanted them to know had vanished as smoke deserts the dying embers that made it."

"The future flickered before him as a likely series of disappointments."

"In a knot of eight crossings, which is about the average-size knot, there are 256 different 'over-and-under' arrangements possible... Make only one change in this 'over and under' sequence and either an entirely different knot is made or no knot at all may result."

"All stemmed from Quoyle's chief failure, a failure of normal appearance."

"Quoyle large, white, stumbling along going nowhere"

"Quoyle, who spoke little himself, inspired talkers. His only skill in the game of life"

"That was the stuff of other lives, he was waiting for his to begin. He got in the habit of walking around the trailer and asking aloud, "Who knows?" He said, "Who knows?" For no one knew. He meant, anything could happen. A spinning coin, still balanced on its rim, may fall in either direction."

"Quoyle with regards to Petal, his wife, "There was a month of fiery happiness. Then six kinked years of suffering...In another time, in another sex, she would have been Genghis Khan."

"Why do we weep in grief,' the aunt wondered. 'Dogs, deer, birds sufferent with dry eyes and in silence. The dumb suffering of animals. Probably a survival technique."

"Quoyle, you got any maritime connections?' 'My grandfather was a sealer.' 'Jesus. You always come out at me out of left field."

"Dad, there's smoke coming out of the can and coming out of your mouth, too. How do you do that, daddy?"

"And three lucky stones strung on a wire to keep the house safe."

"the old place of the Quoyles, half ruined, isolated, the walls and doors of it pumiced by stony lives of dead generations. The aunt felt a hot pang. Nothing would drive them out a second time."

"He [Quoyle] did not want a boat, shied from the thought of water. Ashamed he could not swim, couldn't learn."

"'Dad, are we scared?' said Sunshine. 'No, honey. It's an adventure."

"It was not until the next evening that he discovered he had a page from Leviticus stuck to his back."

"Petal, like a persistent song phrase, like a few stubborn lines of verse memorized in childhood. The needle was stuck."

"For the devil had long ago taken a shine to Tert Card, filled him like a cream horn with itch and irritation. His middle initial was X. Face like cottage cheese clawed with a fork."

"which bloody misbegotten Card takes the liberty of recasting in his own insane tongue. As the bloody bog-rat's just done."

"The editorial page played streams of invective across the provincial political scene like a fire hose. Harangues, pitted with epithets. Gammy bird was a hard bite. Looked life right in its shifty, bloodshot eye. A tough little paper. Gave Quoyle an uneasy feeling, the feeling of standing on a playground watching others play games whose rules he didn't know."

"We run a car wreck photo every week, whether we have a car wreck or not. That's our golden rule."

"Nutbeem influenced a little by the lunar cycle. Had a touch of werewolf. At full moon he burst, talked himself dry, took exercise in the form of dancing and fighting at the Starlight Lounge, then slowly fell back to contemplation."

"The ocean twitched like a vast cloth spread over snakes."

"When I was bullied: you manned-up. You learned something. You realized: I'm not getting the gold star. You realized: you lose. Deal with it."

"I didn’t think anyone outside of LA would read Less Than Zero. I thought The Rules of Attraction would be a huge hit. I assumed people would react to American Psycho as a comedy. I thought I showcased some of my best writing in The Informers. And I was totally caught off-guard by the amount of good reviews and bad reviews Glamorama elicited. I’ve stopped guessing because I’m always wrong. And quite honestly: I don’t care. Writing the book is the main thing. Waiting for a reaction: a waste of time. But, obviously, I hope people respond to the book in a favorable way. I don’t want people to dislike it. But I don’t really mind if they do."

"I read it for the first time in about 20 years this year–-recently. It wasn't so bad. I get it. I get fan mail now from people who weren't really born yet when the book came out. I don't think it's a perfect book by any means, but it's valid. I get where it comes from. I get what it is. I know that sounds so ambiguous. It's sort of out of my hands and it has its reputation so what can you do about it? There's a lot of it that I wish was slightly more elegantly written. Overall, I was pretty shocked. It was pretty good writing for someone who was 19. I was pretty surprised by the level of writing."

"It might be my favorite book of mine. It was a very exciting time in my life. I was writing that book while I was at college. Sort of like the best of times, the worst of times. There was a lot of elation, there was a lot of despair. It was just a really fun book to write. I loved mimicking all the different voices. The stream of conscious does get a little out of hand. I kind of like that about the book. It's kind of all over the place. It's casual. It's scruffy. That's the one book of mine that I have a very, very soft spot for."

"I reread that book in the summer of '03. . . . And I hadn't looked at that book either since '91. And I was dreading it. I thought it was going to be a really terrible novel. Everything everyone had ever said about it was going to be true. . . . And I started reading it... and I was surprised. It was good. It was fun. It was not nearly as pretentious as I remember I wanted it to be when I was writing it. Not nearly as weighted down with the importance that I thought I was investing it with. I found it really fast-moving. I found it really funny. And I liked it a lot. The violence was... it made my toes curl. I really freaked out. I couldn't believe how violent it was. It was truly upsetting. I had to steel myself to reread those passages."

"It's definitely the book that I can tell—I don't know if other people can tell but I can tell as a writer–-is probably the most divisive that I've written. It has an equal number of detractors as it does fans. It doesn't really hold true with the other books. It was the one that took the longest to write, and the one that seemed the most important at the time. It's an unwieldy book... I like it."

"People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles."

"Disappear here."

"...and it's a story that might bore you but you don't have to listen, she told me, because she always knew it was going to be like that, and it was, she thinks, her first year, or actually weekend, really a Friday, in September, at Camden, and this was three or four years ago, and she got so drunk that she ended up in bed, lost her virginity (late, she was eighteen) in Lorna Slavin's room, because she was a Freshman and had a roommate and Lorna was, she remembers, a Senior or Junior and usually somestimes at her boyfriend's place off-campus, to who she thought was a Sophomore Ceramics major but who was actually either some guy from N.Y.U., a film student, and up in New Hampshire just for The Dressed to Get Screwed party, or a townie."

"ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Miserables on its side blocking his view, but Price who is with Pierce & Pierce and twenty-six doesn't seem to care because he tells the driver he will give him five dollars to turn up the radio, "Be My Baby" on WYNN, and the driver, black, not American, does so."

""Wait," she gasps. "What?" I moan, puzzled but almost there. "Luis is a despicable twit," she gasps, trying to push me out of her. "Yes," I say, leaning on top of her, tonguing her ear. "Luis is a despicable twit. I hate him too," and now, spurred on by her disgust for her wimp boyfriend, I start moving faster, my climax approaching. "No, you idiot," she groans. "I said Is it a receptacle tip? Not 'Is Luis a despicable twit.' Is it a receptacle tip? Get off me." "Is what a what? I moan. "Pull out," she groans, struggling. "I'm ignoring you," I say, moving my mouth down on her small perfect nipples, both of them stiff, sitting on hard, big tits. "Pull out, goddamnit!" she screams. "What do you want, Courtney?" I grunt, slowing my thrusts down until I finally straighten up and then I'm just kneeling over her, my cock still half inside. She hunches back against the headboard and my dick slides out."

"As the salesgirl rings up Charles's purchases, I'm playing with the baby while Nancy holds her, offering Glenn my platinum American Express card, and she grabs at it excitedly, and I'm shaking my head, talking in a high-pitched baby voice, squeezing her chin, waving the card in front of her face, cooing, "Yes I'm a total psychopathic murderer, oh yes I am, I like to kill people, oh yes I do, honey, little sweetie pie, yes I do...""

"Though I am satisfied at first by my actions, I'm suddenly jolted with a mournful despair at how useless, how extraordinarily painless, it is to take a child's life. This thing before me, small and twisted and bloody, has no real history, no worthwhile past, nothing is really lost. It's so much worse (and more pleasurable) taking the life of someone who has hit his or her prime, who has the beginnings of a full history, a spouse, a network of friends, a career, whose death will upset far more people whose capacity for grief is limitless than a child's would, perhaps ruin many more lives than just the meaningless, puny death of this boy."

"The smell of meat and blood clouds up the condo until I don't notice it anymore. And later my macabre joy sours and I'm weeping for myself, unable to find solace in any of this, crying out, sobbing "I just want to be loved," cursing the earth and everything I have been taught: principles, distinctions, choices, morals, compromises, knowledge, unity, prayer - all of it was wrong, without any final purpose. All it came down to was: die or adapt."

"This was what I could understand, this was how I lived my life, what I constructed my movement around, how I dealt with the tangible. This was the geography around which my reality revolved: it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one's taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a gesture, of receiving another person's love or kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term "generosity of spirit" applied to nothing, was a cliché, was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire – meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failure, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt anymore. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in... this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged..."

"...there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there. It is hard for me to make sense on any given level. Myself is fabricated, an aberration. I am a noncontingent human being. My personality is sketchy and unformed, my heartlessness goes deep and is persistent. My conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago (probably at Harvard) if they ever did exist. There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it, I have now surpassed."

"My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this – and I have, countless times, in just about every act I've committed – and coming face-to-face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling. There has been no reason for me to tell you any of this. This confession has meant nothing..."

"Well, though I know I should have done that instead of not doing it, I'm twenty-seven for Christ sakes and this is, uh, how life presents itself in a bar or in a club in New York, maybe anywhere, at the end of the century and how people, you know, me, behave, and this is what being Patrick means to me, I guess, so, well, yup, uh..." and this is followed by a sigh, then a slight shrug and another sigh, and above one of the doors covered by red velvet drapes in Harry's is a sign and on the sign in letters that match the drapes' color are the words THIS IS NOT AN EXIT."

"Specks—specks all over the third panel, see?—no, that one—the second one up from the floor and I wanted to point this out to someone yesterday but a photo shoot intervened and Yaki Nakamari or whatever the hell the designer's name is—a master craftsman not—mistook me for someone else so I couldn't register the complaint, but, gentlemen—and ladies—there they are: specks, annoying, tiny specks, and they don't look accidental but like they were somehow done by a machine—so I don't want a lot of description, just the story, streamlined, no frills, the lowdown: who, what, where, when and don't leave out why, though I'm getting the distinct impression by the looks on your sorry faces that why won't get answered—now, come on, goddamnit, what's the story?"

"We'll slide down the surface of things..."

"'As a general rule you shouldn't expect too much from people darling,' and then I kiss her on the cheek."

"'I just had my makeup done, so you can't make me cry.'"

"She staggers over to the bathroom door and grabs the edge of it to balance herself and blood starts running down her legs in thin rivulets and when she lifts up the robe we both can see her underwear soaked with blood and she pulls it off, panicking, and suddenly a huge gush of blood expels itself from beneath the robe, splashing all over the bathroom floor.She gasps, a thick noise comes out of her throat and she doubles over, grabbing her stomach, then she screams. Looking surprised and still clutching her stomach, she vomits will staggering backwards, collapsing onto the bathroom floor. There are strands of tissue hanging out of her."

"I'm Christian Bale", Russel, says, taking [her hand]. "Oh right," she says. "Yeah, I thought I recognized you. You're the actor."

"The stars are real. The future is that mountain."

"You do an awfully good impression of yourself."

"And now the missing Boy Scout inevitably provoked the flicker of worry I experienced every morning before Robby and Sarah went off to school, especially if the hangover was bad or I'd had too much coffee. This wide-awake nightmare lasted no more than thirty seconds, a rapid montage that nonetheless required a Klonopin: a rampage at the school, "I'm so scared" being whispered over the cell phone, what sounds like firecrackers popping off in the background, the ricocheting bullet that hurls the second-grader to the floor,the random firing in the library, the blood sprayed over an unfinished exam, the red pools of it forming on the linoleum, the desk spattered with viscera, a wounded teacher ushering dazed children out of the cafeteria, the custodian shot in the back, the girl murmuring "I think I've been hit" before she faints, the CNN vans arriving, the stuttering sheriff at the emergency press conference, the bulletins flashing on TV screens, the "concerned" anchorman offering updates, the helicopters hovering, the final moments when the gunman places the Magnum in his mouth, the overcrowded hospital emergency rooms and the gymnasiums transformed into makeshift morgues, the yellow crime tape ribboned around an entire playground - and then, in the aftermath: the .22 rifle missing from the stepfather's cabinet, the journal recounting the boy's rejection and despair, a boy who took the teasing hard, the boy who had nothing to lose, the Elavil that didn't take hold or the bipolar disorder not detected, the book on witchcraft found beneath the bed, the X carved into his chest and the attempted suicide the month before, the broken hand from punching a wall, the nights lying in bed counting to a thousand, the pet rabbit found later that afternoon hanged from a hook in a small closet - and, finally, the closing images of the endless coverage: the flag at half-staff, the memorial services, the hundreds of bouquets and candles and toys that filled the steps leading up to the school, the bloody hand of a victim on the cover of Newsweek, the questions asked, the simple shrugs, the civil suits filed, the copycats, the reasons you quit praying. Still, the worst news comes out of your own child's mouth: "But he was normal, Dad - he was just like me.""

"I hear today's college women are 'prodigious.'" "Prodigious? Is that what you heard?" "Well, I read it in a magazine. It was something I wanted to believe." "The Jayster. Always a dreamer."

"That doesn't sound like...the Jayster."

"A case could be made for Mr. Ellis as a covert moralist and closet sentimentalist, the best kind, the kind who leaves you space in which to respond as your predispositions nudge you, whether as a commissar or hand-wringer or, like me, as an admirer of his intelligence and craft."

"My secrets cry aloud. I have no need for tongue. My heart keeps open house, My doors are widely swung. An epic of the eyes My love, with no disguise."

"My truths are all foreknown, This anguish self-revealed. I’m naked to the bone, With nakedness my shield."

"The light comes brighter from the east; the caw Of restive crows is sharper on the ear."

"And soon a branch, part of a hidden scene, The leafy mind, that long was tightly furled, Will turn its private substance into green, And young shoots spread upon our inner world."

"He loops in crazy figures half the night Among the trees that face the corner light. But when he brushes up against a screen, We are afraid of what our eyes have seen: For something is amiss or out of place When mice with wings can wear a human face."

"This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks, Cut stems struggling to put down feet, What saint strained so much, Rose on such lopped limbs to a new life?"

"Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch"

"Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath."

"I always felt mean, jogging back over the logging road, As if I had broken the natural order of things in that swampland; Disturbed some rhythm, old and of vast importance, By pulling off flesh from the living planet; As if I had committed, against the whole scheme of life, a desecration."

"Like witches they flew along rows, Keeping creation at ease; With a tendril for needle They sewed up the air with a stem; They teased out the seed that the cold kept asleep, — All the coils, loops and whorls. They trellised the sun; they plotted for more than themselves."

"The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy; But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy."

"Over the gulfs of dream Flew a tremendous bird Further and further away Into a moonless black, Deep in the brain, far back."

"I study the lives on a leaf: the little Sleepers, numb nudgers in cold dimensions."

"At Woodlawn I Heard the dead cry: I was lulled by the slamming of iron, A slow drip over stones, Toads brooding wells."

"I shook the softening chalk of my bones, Saying, Snail, snail, glister me forward, Bird, soft-sigh me home, Worm, be with me. This is my hard time."

"Voice, come out of the silence. Say something. Appear in the form of a spider Or a moth beating the curtain. Tell me: Which is the way I take; Out of what door` do I go, Where and to whom? Dark hollows said, lee to the wind, The moon said, back of an eel, The salt said, look by the sea, Your tears are not enough praise, You will find no comfort here, In the kingdom of bang and blab."

"Who stunned the dirt into noise? Ask the mole, he knows. I feel the slime of a wet nest. Beware Mother Mildew. Nibble again, fish nerves."

"Goodbye, goodbye, old stones, the time-order is going, I have married my hands to perpetual agitation, I run, I run to the whistle of money."

"The mind moved, not alone, Through the clear air, in the silence."

"A lively understandable spirit Once entertained you. It will come again. Be still. Wait."

"I saw the separateness of all things! My heart lifted up with the great grasses; The weeds believed me, and the nesting birds."

"The wind sharpened itself on a rock; A voice sang:"

"Mother of quartz, your words writhe into my ear. Renew the light, lewd whisper."

"The wasp waits. The edge cannot eat the center. The grape listens. The path tells little to the serpent. An eye comes out of the wave. The journey from flesh is longest. A rose sways least. The redeemer comes a dark way."

"Death was not. I lived in a simple drowse: Hands and hair moved through a dream of wakening blossoms. Rain sweetened the cave and the dove still called; The flowers leaned on themselves, the flowers in hollows; And love, love sang toward."

"To stare into the after-light, the glitter left on the lake's surface, When the sun has fallen behind a wooded island; To follow the drips sliding from a lifted oar Held up, while the rower breathes, and the small boat drifts quietly shoreward; To know that light falls and fills, often without our knowing."

"I'll seek my own meekness. What grace I have is enough. The lost have their own pace. The stalks ask something else. What the grave says, The nest denies."

"Bless me and the maze I'm in! Hello, thingy spirit."

"Beginnings start without shade, Thinner than minnows. The live grass whirls with the sun, Feet run over the simple stones, There's time enough. Behold, in the lout's eye, love."

"I take this cadence from a man named Yeats: I take it and I give it back again: For other tunes and other wanton beats Have tossed my heart and fiddled through my brain. Yes, I was dancing mad, and how That came to be the bears and Yeats would know."

"Dante attained the purgatorial hill, Trembled at hidden virtue without flaw, Shook with a mighty power beyond his will, — Did Beatrice deny what Dante saw? All lovers live by longing, and endure: Summon a vision and declare it pure."

"I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go."

"Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how? The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair; I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow."

"Great Nature has another thing to do To you and me; so take the lively air, And, lovely, learn by going where to go."

"This shaking keeps me steady. I should know. What falls away is always. And is near. I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I learn by going where I have to go."

"I knew a woman, lovely in her bones, When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them; Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one: The shapes a bright container can contain!"

"Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay: I'm martyr to a motion not my own; What's freedom for? To know eternity. I swear she cast a shadow white as stone. But who would count eternity in days? These old bones live to learn her wanton ways: (I measure time by how a body sways.)"

"Is pain a promise? I was schooled in pain, And found out what I could of all desire; I weep for what I'm like when I'm alone In the deep center of the voice and fire.I know the motion of the deepest stone. Each one's himself, yet each one's everyone."

"The night wind rises. Does my father live? Dark hangs upon the waters of the soul. My flesh is breathing slower than a wall. Love alters all. Unblood my instinct, love."

"I lived with deep roots once: Have I forgotten their ways — The gradual embrace Of lichen around stones?"

"The moon draws back its waters from the shore. By the lake's edge, I see a silver swan, And she is what I would. In this light air, Lost opposites bend down — Sing of that nothing of which all is made, Or listen into silence, like a god."

"How can I rest in the days of my slowness? I've become a strange piece of flesh, Nervous and cold, bird-furtive, whiskery, With a cheek soft as a hound's ear. What's left is light as a seed; I need an old crone's knowing."

"I have gone into the waste lonely places Behind the eye."

"Too much reality can be a dazzle, a surfeit; Too close immediacy an exhaustion"

"A terrible violence of creation, A flash into the burning heart of the abominable; Yet if we wait, unafraid, beyond the fearful instant, The burning lake turns into a forest pool, The fire subsides into rings of water, A sunlit silence."

"Being, not doing, is my first joy."

"To whom does this terrace belong? — With its limestone crumbling into fine greyish dust, Its bevy of bees, and its wind-beaten rickety sun-chairs? Not to me, but this lizard, Older than I, or the cockroach."

"Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire; What burns me now? Desire, desire, desire."

"I bleed my bones, their marrow to bestow Upon that God who knows what I would know."

"Let others probe the mystery if they can. Time-harried prisoners of Shall and Will — The right thing happens to the happy man."

"God bless the roots! — Body and soul are one! The small become the great, the great the small; The right thing happens to the happy man."

"And I dance with William Blake For love, for Love's sake;And everything comes to One, As we dance on, dance on, dance on."

"Poetry is not a mere shuffling of dead words or even a corralling of live ones. (p. 89)"

"In our age, if a boy or girl is untalented, the odds are in favor of their thinking they want to write. (p. 89)"

"There's an element of desperation in the insistence of the graduate student's respect for knowledge — as opposed to wisdom. (p. 95)"

"The poem, even a short time after being written, seems no miracle; unwritten, it seems something beyond the capacity of the gods."

"Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It's what everything else isn't."

"You can't make poetry simply by avoiding clichés."

"There's a point where plainness is no longer a virtue, when it becomes excessively bald, wrenched."

"You must believe: a poem is a holy thing — a good poem, that is."

"Yet for this we travelled With hope, and not alone, In the country of ourselves, In a country of bright stone."

"Edward, Edward," he said with a patronising smile, "there are no unanswered questions of any relevance. Every question that we need to ask has been answered fully. If you can't find the correct answer then you are obviously asking the wrong question."

"Like any other big government department, it looks good on paper but is an utter shambles. Petty infighting and political agendas, arrogance and sheer bloody-mindedness almost guarantees that the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing."

"“It was a coincidence.” “I don’t believe in coincidences.” “Neither do I. That’s a coincidence, isn’t it?”"

"Don’t ever call me mad, Mycroft. I’m not mad. I’m just...well, differently moraled, that’s all."

"“James Crometty!” demanded Bowden. “Did you kill him?” “I kill a lot of people,” whispered Felix7. “I don’t remember names.” “You shot him six times in the face.” The dying killer smiled. “That I remember.” “Six times! Why?” Felix7 frowned and started to shiver. “Six was all I had,” he answered simply."

"“Haven’t I seen your face somewhere else?” “No, it’s always been right here on the front of my head.”"

"“It’s easy. A lobotomized monkey could do it.” “And where are we going to find a lobotomized monkey at this time of night?”"

"The industrial age had only just begun; the planet had reached its Best Before date."

"You’ve got a face longer than a Dickens novel."

"I could almost see common sense and denial fighting away at each other within her. In the end, denial won, as it so often does."

"My father told me that for the most part coincidences could be safely ignored: they were merely that chance discovery of one pertinent fact from a million or so possible daily interconnections. “Stop a stranger in the street,” he would say, “and delve into each other’s past. Pretty soon an astounding-too-amazing-to-be-chance coincidence will appear.”"

"“He said you were very dangerous.” “No more dangerous than anyone else who dares to speak the truth.”"

"“We’re fine, Joff. You?” “Not that good, Thurs. The Church of the Global Standard Deity has undergone a split.” “No!” I said with his much surprise and concern in my voice as I could muster. “I’m afraid so. The new Global Standard Clockwise Deity have broken away due to unresolvable differences over the direction in which the collection plate is passed round.” “Another split? That’s the third this week!” “Fourth,” replied Joffy dourly, “and it’s only Tuesday. The Standardized pro-Baptist conjoined Methodarian-Lutherian sisters of something-or-other split into two subgroups yesterday. Soon,” he added grimly, “there won’t be enough ministers to man the splits.”"

"“Well,” he said thoughtfully, “it is my considered opinion that most coincidences are simply quirks of chance—if you extrapolate the bell curve of probability you will find statistical abnormalities that seem unusual but are, in actual fact, quite likely, given the amount of people on the planet and the amount of different things we do in our lives.”"

"Marriage, like spinach and opera, was something I had never thought I would like."

"It wasn’t going to be hard—it was going to be impossible. It wouldn’t deter me. I’d done impossible things several times in the past, and the prospect didn’t scare me as much as it used to."

"“Do you know what the worst bit about dying is?” “Tell me, Gran.” “You never get to see how it all turns out.”"

"Mr. McGregor’s a nasty piece of work, isn’t he? Quite the Darth Vader of children’s literature."

"My father said it was a delightfully odd—and dangerously self-destructive—quirk of humans that we were far more interested in pointless trivia then in genuine news stories."

"“You’re crazy!” “Undoubtedly. But look around you. You followed me in here. Who’s crazier? The crazy or the crazy who follows him?”"

"“Don’t believe this,” murmured Miss Havisham. “It’s all poppycock. Her majesty is a verb short of a sentence.”"

"“I’ll tell you what love is,” I told her. “It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your heart and soul to the smiter!”"

"“And nothing can stop it?” “Nothing I know of,” he replied sadly. “The best way to stop this is to not allow it to start—sort of a minimum entry requirement for man-made disasters, really.”"

"Books may look like nothing more than words on a page, but they are actually an infinitely complex imaginotransference technology that translates odd, inky squiggles into pictures inside your head."

"“Write is only the word we use to describe the recording process,” replied Snell as we walked along. “The Well of Lost Plots is where we interface the writer’s imagination with the characters and plots so that it will make sense in the reader’s mind. After all, reading is arguably a far more creative and imaginative process than writing; when the reader creates emotion in their head, or the colors of the sky during the setting sun, or the smell of a warm summer’s breeze on their face, they should reserve as much praise for themselves as they do for the writer—perhaps more.”"

"“Books”—Snell smiled—“are a kind of magic.”"

"The atmosphere in the room was so thick with dramatic clichés you could have cut it with a knife."

"Anything devised by man has bureaucracy, corruption and error hardwired at inception."

"The leader was identified by his dental records—why he had them on him, no one was quite sure."

"Preservation without expenditure is worthless."

"Failure concentrates the mind wonderfully. If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not trying hard enough."

"Tyrants are all the same—shocking temper when they don’t get their own way!"

"No one had been more surprised than me by the arrival of the Great Panjandrum when I pulled the emergency handle. For the nonbelievers it was something of a shock, but not any less than for the faithful. She had been so long a figure of speech that seeing her in the flesh was something of a shock. I thought she had seemed quite plain and in her midthirties, but Humpty-Dumpty told me later he had been shaped like an egg. In any event, the marble statue that now stands in the lobby of the Council of Genres depicts the Great Panjandrum as Mr. Price the stonemason saw him—with a leather apron and carrying a mallet and stone chisel."

"Hamlet would worry about having nothing to worry about if he had nothing to worry about."

"“’Tis very strange!” he murmured, staring at the sun, trees, houses and traffic in turn. “It would take a rhapsody of wild and whirling words to do justice of all that I witness!” “You’re going to have to speak English out here.” “All this,” explained Hamlet, waving his hands at the fairly innocuous Swindon street, “would take millions of words to describe correctly!” “You’re right. It would. That’s the magic of the book imagino-transference technology,” I told him. “A few dozen words conjure up an entire picture. But in all honesty the reader does most of the work.” “The reader? What’s it got to do with him?” “Well, each interpretation of an event, setting or character is unique to each of those who read it because they clothe the author’s description with the memory of their own experiences. Every character they read is actually a complex amalgam of people that they’ve met, read or seen before—far more real than it can ever be just from the text on the page. Because every reader’s experiences are different, each book is unique for each reader.”"

"Good evening and welcome to Evade the Question Time, the nation’s premier topical talk show. Tonight, as every night, a panel of distinguished public figures generally evade answering the audience’s questions and instead toe the party line."

"Money had never been a problem in the Book World. All the details of life were taken care of by something called Narrative Assumption. A reader would assume you had gone shopping, or gone to the toilet, or brushed your hair, so a writer never needed to outline it."

"If the real world were a book, it would never find a publisher. Overlong, detailed to the point of distraction—and ultimately, without a major resolution."

"My father always argued that time was far and away the most valuable commodity we had and that temporal profligacy should be a criminal offense—which kind of makes watching Celebrity Kidney Swap or reading Daphne Farquitt novels a crime straightaway."

"“Look here, St. Zvlkx,” said Volescamper as they walked towards the marquee for tea and scones, “what was the thirteenth century like?” “The Mayor wants to know what the thirteenth century was like—and no lip, sunshine.” “Filthy, damp, disease-ridden and pestilential.” “He said it was like London, Your Grace.”"

"“Humans are molded by evolution to be short-termists, Miss Next,” he continued. His voice rumbled deeply and seemed to echo inside my head. “We need only to see our children to reproductive age to be successful in a biological sense. We have to move beyond that. If we see ourselves as residents on this planet for the long term, we need to plan for the long term.”"

"Whatever. As far as I can see, there is one state of dead and that’s ‘not living.’ Now, do you have anything useful to add to this investigation or not?”"

"For centuries I’ve been worrying about audiences seeing me as a mouthy spoiled brat who can’t make up his mind about anything, but, having seen the real world, I can understand the appeal. My play is popular because my failings are your failings, my indecision the indecision of you all. We all know what has to be done; it’s just that sometimes we don’t know how to get there. Acting without thought doesn’t really help in the long run. I might dither for a while, but at least I make the right decision in the end: I bear my troubles and take arms against them. And thereby lies a message for all mankind, although I’m not exactly sure what it is. Perhaps there’s no message. I don’t really know. Besides, if I don’t dither, there’s no play."

"The dangerously high level of the stupidity surplus was once again the lead story in the The Owl that Morning. The reason for the crisis was clear: Prime Minister Redmond van de Poste and his ruling Commonsense Party had been discharging their duties with a reckless degree of responsibility that bordered on inspired sagacity. Instead of drifting from one crisis to the next and appeasing the nation with a steady stream of knee-jerk legislation and headline-grabbing but arguably pointless initiatives, they had been resolutely building a raft of considered long-term plans that concentrated on unity, fairness and tolerance. It was a state of affairs deplored by Mr. Alfredo Traficcone, leader of the opposition Prevailing Wind Party, who wanted to lead the nation back onto the safer grounds of uninformed stupidity."

"“The stupidity surplus,” repeated Landen as he sat down at the kitchen table, “I’m all for responsible government, but storing it up like this is bound to cause problems sooner or later—even by acting sensibly, the government has shown itself to be a bunch of idiots.” “There are a lot of idiots in this country,” I replied absently, “and they deserve representation as much as the next man.”"

"How about this for a title: Men Are from Earth, Women Are from Earth—Just Deal with It."

"“Tell them ballocks.” “They’ll pay me five hundred guineas.” “Cancel the ballocks thing—tell them you’ll be honored and overjoyed.” “It’s a sellout. I don’t do sellouts. Not for that price anyway.”"

"The first four in the series had been less a lighthearted chronicling of my adventures and more of a “Dirty Harry meets Fanny Hill,” but with a good deal more sex and violence."

"“Oh!” said Landen, reading a letter. “A rejection from my publisher. They didn’t think Fatal Parachuting Mistakes and How to Avoid Making Them Again was what they had in mind for self-help.” “I guess their target audience doesn’t include dead people.” “You could be right.”"

"“How is the book going?” I asked returning to my knitting. “The self-help stuff?” “The magnum opus.” Landen looked thoughtful for a moment and then said, “More opus than magnum. I’m trying to figure out whether the lack of progress is writer’s block, procrastination, idleness or just plain incompetence.”"

"I just had an idea for a cheap form of power: by bringing pasta and antipasta together, we could be looking at the utter annihilation of ravioli and liberation of vast quantities of energy."

"“I am surprised to see you because…you died six years ago!” “I did?” inquired Mycroft with genuine concern. “Why does no one tell me these things?” I shrugged, as there was really no good answer to this."

"“Dead,” muttered Mycroft with a resigned air. “Never been that before. Not even once. Are you quite sure?”"

"“Incredibly enough, reality TV has just gotten worse.” “Is that possible? I asked. “Wasn’t Celebrity Trainee Pathologist the pits?” I thought for a moment. “Actually, Whose Life Support Do We Switch Off? was worse. Or maybe Sell Your Granny. Wow, the choice these days makes it also tricky to decide. Bowden laughed. “I’ll agree that Granny lowered the bar for distasteful program makers everywhere, but RTA-TV, never one to shrink from a challenge, has devised Samaritan Kidney Swap. Ten renal-failure patients take turns trying to convince a tissue-typed donor—and the voting viewers—which one should have his spare kidney.” I groaned. Reality TV was to me the worst form of entertainment—the modern equivalent of paying sixpence to watch lunatics howling at the wall down at the local madhouse."

"“Listen to what it says in the horoscopes: ‘If it is your birthday, there may be an increased amount of mail. Expect gifts, friendly salutations from people and the occasional surprise. Possibility of cake.’ That’s so weird—I wonder if any of it will come true?”"

"I’d come to realize over the years that anything created by mankind had error, mischief and bureaucratic officialdom hardwired at inception, and the fictional world was no different."

"“What’s in Hangar One at the moment?” I asked the driver. “The Magus.” “Still?” Even the biggest refit never took more than a week, and John Fowles’s labyrinthine-plotted masterpiece had been in there nearly five. “It’s taking longer than we thought—they removed all the plot elements for cleaning, and no one can remember how they go back together again.” “I’m not sure it will make a difference,” I murmured as we pulled up outside Hangar Eight."

"But his hits were greater than the sum of his misses, and such is the way with greatness."

"Noting with dismay that most cross-religion bickering occurred only because all the major religions were convinced that they were the right one and every other religion was the wrong one, the founders of the Global Standard Deity based their fledgling “portmanteau” faith on the premise that most religions want the same thing once all the shameless, manipulative power play had been subtracted: peace, stability, equality and justice—the same as the nonfaiths. As soon as they found that centralizing thread that unites all people and makes a dialogue of sorts with a Being of Supreme Moral Authority mostly optional, the GSD flourished."

"“How is the faith-unification business?” “We’ve nearly got everyone,” said Joffy with a smile. “The atheists came on board last week. Once we had suggested that ‘god’ could be a set of essentially beneficent physical rules of the cosmos, they were only too happy to join. In fact, apart from a few scattered remnants of faith leaders who can’t quite come to terms with the loss of their power, influence and associated funny hats, it’s all looking pretty good.”"

"You’ll excuse me if I’m not convinced by your supposed altruism."

"“Friday may have tricked his parents, the SHE and half the ChronoGuard, but there’s one person no teenage boy ever managed to fool.” “And that is?” “His younger sister.”"

"Friday nodded and took a deep breath. “Has anyone noticed how short attention spans seem to have cast a certain latitude across the nation?” “Do I ever,” I replied, rolling my eyes and thinking of the endlessly downward clicking of the Read-O-Meter. “No one’s reading books anymore. They seem to prefer the mind numbing spectacle of easily digested trash TV and celebrity tittle-tattle.” “Exactly,” said Friday. “The long view has been eroded. We can’t see beyond six months, if that, and short-termism will spell our end.”"

"The Commonsense Party’s first major policy reversal of perceived current wisdom was with the scrapping of performance targets, league standings and the attempt to make subtle human problems into figures on a graph that could be solved quickly and easily through “initiatives.” Arguing that important bodies such as the Health Service should have the emphasis on care and not on administration, the Commonsense party forced through legislation that essentially argued, “If it takes us ten years to get into the shit, it will take us twenty years to get out—and that journey starts now.”"

"“You’ll forgive me for saying this,” said Webastow, looking over his glasses, “but this is the most harebrained piece of unadulterated stupidity that any government has ever undertaken anywhere.” “Thank you very much,” replied Ms. Yogert courteously. “I’ll make sure your compliments are forwarded to Prime Minister van de Post.”"

"A third faction who called them selves “simplists” argued that there was a single fundamental rule the governed all story: if it works, it works."

"Rescue seemed a very remote possibility, and that was at the nub of the whole ethical-dilemma argument. You never come out on top, no matter what. The only way to win the game is not to play."

"“I need to get home and have a long, hot bath and then a martini.” Thursday5 thought for a moment. “After you’ve drunk the long, hot bath,” she observed, “you’ll never have room for the martini.”"

"“The ChronoGuard has shut itself down, and time travel is as it should be: technically, logically and theoretically…impossible.” “Good thing, too,” replied Landen. “It always made my head ache. In fact I was thinking of doing a self-help book for SF novelists eager to write about time travel. It would consist of a single word: Don’t.”"

"About ten degrees upslope of Fiction, I could see our nearest neighbor: Artistic Criticism. It was an exceptionally beautiful island, yet deeply troubled, confused and suffused with a blanketing layer of almost impenetrable bullshit."

"To a text-based life-form, unpredictable syntax and poor grammar is a source of huge discomfort. Ill-fitting grammar are like ill-fitting shoes. You can get used to it for a bit, but then one day your toes fall off and you can’t walk to the bathroom. Poor syntax is even worse. Change word order and a sentence useless for anyone Yoda except you have."

"I didn’t know much about Conspiracy, but I did know that its theorists were mostly paranoid and tended to value conviction above evidence."

"To fail spectacularly is a loser’s paradise."

"The good thing about being in the BookWorld is that we aren’t hampered by anything as awkward as physical laws. The RealWorld must be hideously annoying to do science in."

"“It’s highly disorderly,” he explained, “not like here. There is no easily definable plot, and you can run yourself ragged wondering what the significance can be of a chance encounter. You’ll also find that for the most part there is no shorthand to the narrative, so everything happens in a long and painfully drawn out sequence. Apparently the talk can be confusing—for the most part, people just say the first thing that comes into their heads.” “Is it as bad as they say it is?” “I’ve heard it’s worse. Here in the BookWorld, we say what needs to be said for the story to proceed. Out there? Well, you can discount at least eighty percent of chat as just meaningless drivel.” “I never thought the percentage was that high.” “In some individuals it can be as high as ninety-two percent. The people to listen to are the ones who don’t say very much.”"

"“Bipedal movement is the skill of controlled falling,” said Square. “If it weren’t so commonplace, it would seem miraculous—like much out here, to be truthful.”"

"Humans are more or less identical except for a few peculiar habits generally delineated by geographic circumstances and historical precedent. But essentially, they’re all the same and reading from the same rule book. To get along you have to appreciate the rules, but also know that other people know the rules—and that they know that you know the rules. Get it?"

"“Did she believe you?” “She’s an excellent journalist—of course not.”"

"Mrs. Next came back into the room. “You never told me you’d bought a gold-plated toilet.” Landen frowned. “We don’t have a gold-plated toilet.” “Oh, dear,” said Mrs. Next. I think I’ve just peed in your tuba.”"

"“Why didn’t he say so directly?” asked Sprockett, not unreasonably. “This is Fiction,” I explained. “The exigency of drama requires events to be clouded in ambiguity.”"

"The idea that people actually do this because they like it strikes me as double insanity with added insanity."

"Sprockett buzzed briefly to himself. “Does that sort of thing happen out there in the RealWorld, or is it just in books?” I thought for a moment. Of the untidy chaos I had seen in the RealWorld; of not knowing what was going to happen; of not knowing what, if anything, head relevance. The RealWorld was a sprawling mess of a book in need of a good editor. I thought then of the narrative order here in the BookWorld, our resolved plot lines and the observance of natural justice we took for granted. “Literature is claimed to be a mirror of the world,” I said, “but the Outlanders are fooling themselves. The BookWorld is as orderly as people in the RealWorld hope their own world to be—it isn’t a mirror, it’s an aspiration.”"

"Everything comes to an end. A good bottle of wine, a summer’s day, a long-running sitcom, one’s life, and eventually our species. The question for many of us is not that everything will come to an end but when. And can we do anything vaguely useful until it does?"

"Sadly, a lifetime in law enforcement tends not to create a bunch of grateful villains happy that you have shown them the error of their ways, but rather a lot of disgruntled ne’er-do-wells eager for payback."

"Having to mix with dimwits is hideously boring. Great-Uncle Mycroft put it best when he said that for a genius this planet is excruciatingly dull, only made briefly more illuminating when another genius happens along."

"“It’s simply part of wider research on a neural expansifier that increases the synaptic pathways in the brain. Aside from repairing traumatic damage and reversing the effects of dementia, it can potentially make dumb people smart.” “I’m trying hard, but I’m not sure I can think of a more useful invention.”"

"“Do I have to talk to insane people?” “You’re a librarian now. I’m afraid it’s mandatory.”"

"I don’t think God has any more idea than you or I about what’s going on."

"“Think of it this way: A single brain cell has no intelligence, but in company it can do extraordinary things. Perhaps the entirety of existence is the true, unifying intelligence that drives what occurs—for a reason that is quite beyond our understanding, or even to a higher plane where the concept of understanding is laughably redundant.” It was an interesting concept. Mycroft had often theorized that the whole of existence was so large and hideously complex that it must be sentient. And if this were so, then it must have a truly warped sense of humor and have an abiding love of math and hydrogen—and a deep loathing for order."

"“I always really admired you growing up. Always smiling through your unhappiness. A real inspiration.” “I wasn’t unhappy.” “You looked unhappy.” “Looks can be deceptive.” “All too true,” she said, “but I meant what I said: inspirational in a sort of tragic way, like you were the failure in the family, but always looked on the bright side of everything.” “You’re very kind,” I said, long used to Megan’s ways, “but it could have been much worse: I could have been born without tact or empathy, and be shallow, self-absorbed and hideously patronizing.”"

"It would have been easy to dislike her intensely, but I actually felt nothing for her at all."

"“What do you think?” “I can hardly contain my indifference.”"

"“Jealous?” she said. “Of what you have to offer? A second-rate Consul and a third-rate vaudeville act peddling fourth-rate advice to a fifth-rate Novice?”"

"“You need to delay the train.” “How do I do that?” “Your head on the rails?” “Seriously?” “I don’t know. But put it this way: if you don’t delay the train, I will punch you five times hard in the head.” “Once would probably be enough as a punishment.” “You don’t need to be punished, you need motivating. And not getting punched five times is a terrific motivator. Take my word for it.”"

"More welcoming were a couple of Welsh Tourist Board posters. One was advertising the local area with the now-universal slogan “Visit Wales – Not Always Raining.”"

"“Passing through?” “Yes; here to meet with Moody.” “You’ll get more sense from lichen. What’s with your head?” Unlike talking to The Notable Goodnight, where I needed to be polite, this was an answer I could have fun with. “It’s the final stages of an excruciatingly painful and incurable genital wasting disease. Luckily, it’s only spread by skin contact. Sorry, I should’ve said that before I shook your hand. Remiss of me – apologies.” Shamanic Bob smiled. “Fair enough,” he said. “I think I deserved that.” “Yes, I think you did.”"

"“I’ll be honest,” I said, “I have nothing against anyone who believes, but I think it’s a dangerous nonsense.”"

"If you’ve not dreamed, you’ve never truly slept. Dreams are the place where you can be yourself; do anything, be anything. The mind set free."

"“She can’t be that volatile.” “She punched me in the eye so hard she detached my retina,” he said, “and all I did was place the preposition at the end of the sentence.”"

"Feedback loops, echo chambers, circular reinforcement. All could play a part in escalating the utterly imaginary to the level of reality, sometimes with fatal consequences."

"There were the rules we were taught, and there were the rules we did our job by. The two were related, but as distant cousins rather than siblings."

"No, I don’t want to seem underhand or insulting but Toccata’s a poisonous, untrustworthy, self-serving little reptile – with a severe personality disorder and a disquieting capacity for cannibalism."

"“Last season we had the Reduced Shakespeare Company doing ‘Highlights of the Mostly Complete History of Condensing Stuff (abridged)’.”"

"“Agree?” “Yes, ma’am.” “I don’t like subordinates always agreeing,” she said. “Sycophants have no place in my department. You’re to speak your mind when the opportunity calls for it.” “How will I know when that is?” “I shall inform you.”"

"I don’t care one way or the other if the big A is using you to scratch an itch, but think very carefully of actions, Wonky. They have a dismaying tendency to be followed by consequences, and sometimes quite bad ones."

"“I lost sixty soldiers under my command.” “Your fault?” I asked. “No, but they were all my responsibility, so it amounts to the same thing.”"

"“It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not,” he said, “it’s what everyone believes that’s important.”"

"People die in the Winter; it’s what it’s there for."

"I’d been so convinced of that particular narrative I never for one moment stopped to reappraise the situation."

"“How is that working out?” I asked. “Somewhere between frustratingly slow and fiendishly elusive.”"

"“Oh, hullo, Worthing,” he said in a cheery manner. “How are things?” “Outlook stormy with a chance of scattered death moving in randomly from all points of the compass.”"

"You’ll know the beginning easily enough; it’s when it all started going weird."

"The numbers were too great for HiberTech to hide what had happened. As it was, well-engineered corporate surprise, orchestrated bafflement, faux delight, suitable soul-searching and feigned contrition won the day."

"Winter isn’t a season – it’s a calling."

"The past beats inside me like a second heart."

"Ian McEwan is a very good writer; the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters."

"Saturday is a dismayingly bad book. The numerous set pieces—brain operations, squash game, the encounters with Baxter, etc. — are hinged together with the subtlety of a child's Erector Set. The characters too, for all the nuzzling and cuddling and punching and manhandling in which they are made to indulge, drift in their separate spheres, together but never touching, like the dim stars of a lost galaxy. The politics of the book is banal, of the sort that is to be heard at any middle-class Saturday-night dinner party, before the talk moves on to property prices and recipes for fish stew. There are good things here, for instance the scene when Perowne visits his senile mother in an old-folks' home, in which the writing is genuinely affecting in its simplicity and empathetic force. Overall, however, Saturday has the feel of a neoliberal polemic gone badly wrong; if Tony Blair — who makes a fleeting personal appearance in the book, oozing insincerity — were to appoint a committee to produce a "novel for our time," the result would surely be something like this."

"Saramago is … interesting, but I don't think I would put it higher than that … [he] ventures too far into the realm of 'magic realism' for my taste. Reality itself is magical enough without inventing whimsicalities."

"If they give me the bloody prize, why can't they say nice things about me?"

"The white May blossom swooned slowly into the open mouth of the grave."

"I would have failed, of course, but failure is the condition of the artist's life. What kind of failure would I have enjoyed, suffered? I know it was not all waste. My hopeless daubings taught me to look at the world with a painter's eye, despite the poor connection between eye and hand. And the smells of turpentine and linseed oil and paint-soaked rags still make my blood tingle. But words were my calling, and called to me, and I let fall the brush."

"Julian Gough's] notion that shouting the word 'feck' – Father Ted has a lot to answer for – and being grossly scatological will make him seem echt Irish only harms his argument. We who were born and continue to live in Ireland are always distressed by the stage-Irish antics so often to be encountered among the sons and daughters of the diaspora. But it is true, as the critic Declan Kiberd remarks, that no contemporary Irish writer has yet attempted the Great Irish Novel on social and political themes. Where is our Middlemarch, our Doctor Zhivago, our Rabbit trilogy? The fact is Irish fiction tends to be poetic rather than prosaic, which is something that non-Irish reviewers find hard to grasp. John McGahern used to say that there is verse and there is prose, and then there is poetry, and poetry can occur in either form, and that in Ireland it occurs more often in prose than in verse. There may be a grittily realistic novelist even now writing a masterpiece such as Mr Gough says he longs for, and, if so, I applaud her/him."

"I'm a little surprised that commercial success has arrived. I used to think that it was hopeless, that it would never happen."

"It's amazing what success will do. I've just started a new book after taking a break of a year and a half since finishing 'The Book of Evidence,' and I'm fascinated to see if I can detect in myself a voice saying, 'Tone that bit down; make that bit easier; give them a few laughs,' which would be absolutely fatal. I don't think it's happening, but you can't tell what's happening beneath the surface."

"I could have kept [writing "Irish" novels such as Birchwood] and probably had a good deal more success than I did, especially on this side of the Atlantic. But you have to try to do many things. You have to try to do things that you actually think you're incapable of."

"When I think back to then, from out of this sepulchral silence, I am aware of a ceaseless hubbub of voices loudly saying things no one seemed in the least inclined to listen to. It was the Age of Statements."

"Ah, what heights of contempt I was capable of in those days! Now, in old age, I have largely lost that faculty, and I miss it, for it was passion of a sort."

"I have always disliked the sea, its surliness, its menace, its vast reaches and unknowable, shudder-inducing depths."

"Diderot said that what we do is, we erect a statue in our own image inside ourselves—idealised, you know, but still recognisable—and then spend our lives engages in the effort to make ourselves into its likeness."

"But what comfort does belief offer, when it contains within it its own antithesis, the glistening drop of poison at the heart? Is the Pascalian wager sufficient to sustain a life, a real life, in the real world? The fact that you place your bet on red does not mean that the black is not still there."

"I suspect that significant first encounters only take on their aura of significance in retrospect."

"Man is only lovable in the multitude, and at a good distance."

"I have tried to explain to her that the concept of bravery is entirely spurious. We are what we are, we do what we do."

"I was pondering the question, which I have pondered before, of whether such great revelatory moments really so occur, or if it is only that, out of need, our lives so lacking in drama, we invest past events with a significance they do not warrant."

"All the talk now is of freedom and pride (pride!), but these young hotheads in their pink bell-bottoms, clamouring for the right to do it in the streets if they feel like it, do not seem to appreciate, or at least seem to wish to deny, the aphrodisiac properties of secrecy and fear."

"Let's not despise story-telling. Like all novelists, I have this low desire to tell people stories."

"If you look at practically anyone - I mean, I find this more and more - the more you look at people the more you find that they've actually manufactured themselves. People whose names that you know. I meet lots of people in my ordinary life, away from writing, who seem to be authentic, who seem to know where they've come from and who they are, but anyone that I deal with in, if you like, my profession, we all seem to have made ourselves. I think artists are all self-made."

"Ambiguity is the essence of Irish writing, I think."

"The older I get, the more confused I get. I used to think that age would bring wisdom. It doesn't, it just brings confusion. But I find that this confusion is artistically useful. It's a kind of progression, a negative progression. It's moving into areas that you didn't know were there. It becomes more dreamlike all the time. When I was starting out as a novelist, I would have been furious if anyone said to me that novels are dream-like or that they're doing things the novelist didn't know he was doing. Now, I find that it's absolutely true."

"Wodehouse is very interesting. There must be all kinds of darknesses in that man's life."

"We writers are shy, nocturnal creatures. Push us into the light and the light blinds us."

"I feel that over the past 15 years, there has been a steady move toward more populist work. I do feel - and of course I'm completely biased - that this year was a return to the better days of the 80s and early 90s. It was a very good short list and a decent jury; it didn't have any stand-up comedians or media celebs on it, and I think that's what the Man Booker prize should be. There are plenty of other rewards for middle-brow fiction. There should be one decent prize for [pause] real books."

"I'm very much against the notion of the Great Man, the Great Figure who is telling us all how to behave. Writers are just like other people, except slightly more obsessed."

"Once in the 1930s, the Inland Revenue did an investigation into Yeats's tax returns because they could not believe someone so famous could have such small sales. One should never allow oneself to be discouraged by small sales. As Pinter says, I stuck to my guns."

"When I started writing I was a great rationalist and believed I was absolutely in control. But the older one gets, the more confused, and for an artist I think that is quite a good thing: you allow in more of your instinctual self; your dreams, fantasies and memories. It's richer, in a way."

"Summoned, one shuffles guiltily into the department of trivia."

"Oh, I'm terribly ignorant of Czech literature. It's disgraceful really."

"I always remember how a novel written by John Braine in the 1950s about working-class life in England, which was called Room at the Top, which was translated into Swedish as The Attic!"

"I suppose this is peasant food. You know, the workers in the fields needed these heavy dumplings and things to eat, but God don't offer them to me..."

"I don't see why the young in Prague or Budapest or Warsaw shouldn't be allowed to go to hell in a handcart if they want to. They do it everywhere else and they have great fun doing so."

"I'm doing my best to not be too rude about it, but oh my God that Czech food..."

"There is something slightly sinister about Prague, just as there is about Lyon and Turin."

"My books must be an absolute nightmare to translate. I wouldn't do it. I had a couple of them in Japanese some years ago and my wife met a Japanese woman who said that she had read the books. And she asked her what the translations were like. This woman said they were the worst translation she had ever read in her life. She said she didn't recognise the books when she finally read them in English."

"I hesitate to talk about Czech food. [...] The people are very sweet, wonderfully cultured, very friendly, but my God how they eat that food I do not know. It is surely the most disgusting cuisine in the world."

"[T]he older I get the more I realise that the world is not as varied as we thought it was when we were young. Most places are much alike."

"We cannot all afford a farm in Cuba or a suite at the George V in newly liberated Paris, and more often than not must strive to forge our clean, well-lighted sentences at a folding table wedged between the baby's cot and the dining table."

"We all yearn in our hearts to be Larkin's "shit in the shuttered chateau", but few of us achieve that grand apotheosis."

"My present study - a word that always makes me uneasy, I am not sure why - is a small apartment in a huge, anonymous, quadrilateral block in Dublin city centre. My window, the one I do not look out of, gives on to a courtyard where no one ever goes, and where the silence is day-long and almost pastoral. When I first began to come here to work, a dozen years ago, I used to shut my door on entering each morning and put the chain on. The place is clean, or cleanish, and, yes, well lighted. Here I am unassailable. Or so I like to imagine."

"A boy in his teens! What did I know about death? This is a problem for Irish writers — our literary forebears are enormous. They stand behind us like Easter Island statues, and we keep trying to measure up to them, leaping towards heights we can't possibly reach. I suppose that's a good thing, but it makes for a painful early life for the writer. Anyway, hunched there over my Aunt Sadie's Remington, I was starting to learn how to write. Now, fifty years later, I'm still learning."

"I feel a kind of intellectual regret, not an emotional regret, at having left my parents and that world behind. But it's not a great weight on my soul. In a way I wish it were. To leave one’s background without guilt is an indication of shallowness of character, I suspect."

"But trying to be a painter did teach me to look at the world in a very particular way—looking very closely at things, at colors, at how things form themselves in space — and I've always been grateful for that. You have all this space, and you have a figure: what do you do with it? And in a way that’s what all art is. How do we find a place for our creatures, or inventions, in this incoherent space into which we’re thrown?"

"Fiction is just a constant torment, and an embarrassment. I loathe my fiction. I have a fantasy when I'm passing a bookstore that I could click my fingers and all my books would go blank, so that I could start again and get them right."

"I am essentially a religious type. In my teens I gave up Catholicism, and at the same time I started writing. Writing keeps me at my desk, constantly trying to write a perfect sentence. It is a great privilege to make one's living from writing sentences. The sentence is the greatest invention of civilization. To sit all day long assembling these extraordinary strings of words is a marvelous thing. I couldn't ask for anything better. It's as near to godliness as I can get."

"For me, a line has to sing before it does anything else. The great thrill is when a sentence that starts out being completely plain suddenly begins to sing, rising far above itself and above any expectation I might have had for it. That's what keeps me going on those dark December days when I think about how I could be living instead of writing."

"Doing what you do well is death. Your duty is to keep trying to do things that you don't do well, in the hope of learning."

"My wife says I had a nervous breakdown during the writing of Mefisto. Maybe I did, but what's a nervous breakdown for a writer? For a writer every day is a nervous breakdown. [...] The book came out in the spring, and I remember I spent that following summer digging my garden — Voltaire would have been proud. I made a wonderful garden. Grew beans, lettuces. I was healing myself from some kind of traumatic process that I don't pretend to understand. All right, let's agree with my wife and call it a nervous breakdown."

"The world is a dark place, and I find it endlessly funny."

"When I was young, art for me was a new religion. Now I see the aims and ends of art as less grand. If I can catch the play of light on a wall, and catch it just so, that is enough for me. I don’t want to write about human behavior. Art now seems to me in many ways the absolute opposite of psychology. It’s simply saying, This is how it is. This is how it looks, how it feels. To describe things well is far more worthwhile than the kind of cheap psychologizing, or even expensive psychologizing, that the novel so often indulges in."

"Copernicus stuck very closely to the facts, but in Kepler I invented freely, and it's a much better book because of that."

"Flaubert read too many books, and in consequence some of his own books stagger under the weight of his erudition. He said he'd read some preposterous number of books to prepare for the writing of Salammbô, and you can feel them dragging the novel down. It would have been much better if he'd made it all up."

"After all, who knows what the distant past was like? About Kepler and Copernicus, people often say, You captured the period so well! I always want to ask, How do you know? You weren't there either."

"[On book reviewing] I will only turn down a book if I know I won't be able to muster enough interest to read the bloody thing. Or if I realize that I despise the author, and that I'm just going to become hysterical in my dispraise. A couple of times in my life I've disobeyed my own rule, and later regretted it. [...] It's a delicate business. All too often, if one writes a favorable notice, it's seen as a product of the old-boy network, and if one dispraises a book, it's seen as envy. Nobody seems able to accept that I review books as a book reviewer, not as a competing novelist. When I review, I'm being as honest as I can. And I'm saying to the reading public — the minuscule segment of the reading public that reads reviews — that this is my judgment."

"The first thought that occurred to me, that night when I heard the chairman of the jury announce my name, was, Just think how many people hate me at this moment. Naturally, I wanted to annoy those people even further by being arrogant."

"Art is like sex: when you're doing it, nothing else matters. Away from his desk the novelist can care deeply about the social, political, moral aspects of what he is writing but when he sits down to write, all those concerns fall away and nothing matters except the putting down of one carefully chosen word after another carefully chosen word, until a sentence is finished, then a paragraph, then a page, then a chapter, then a book. When I'm working I don't care about anything, not even myself. All my concentration is directed towards the making of the thing on the page. The rest is just stuff — even though it is the stuff of life."

"Every novelist knows – perhaps everyone knows who has written even a letter, or a page of a diary – that the process of composition involves two separate sensibilities."

"There had been rain but it had stopped, and the light from a luminously clouded sky was pewter-bright, and puddles on the road were shivering in the wind, and the rooks above the trees in St Anne's Park were being tossed about the air like scraps of charred paper."

"March in Ireland can be a very lovely month, if you like your air rain-washed and your light wind-shaken."

"The force of the idea was such that I drew the car to the side of the road and stopped and, for some reason, laughed. It was a loud laugh, unsteady, and sounded, even to my own ears, slightly maniacal. Thinking back now, I realise it was less a laugh than the birth-cry of my dark and twin brother Benjamin Black."

"So vivid is my recollection of the birth of Benjamin Black that surely, I feel, a cunning artificer has been at work, fashioning a surreally realistic picture of something that happened quite differently from what I seem to remember. Consider that light falling on the sea, how effulgent and steady it is; consider the trees, improbably full-leafed for the time of year – and look at those birds! Has Madam Memory really such a piercing eye for detail, are her powers of recall so comprehensive?"

"Certain moments remain in the mind with such force and clearness that one suspects they must be invented; that they are not held in the memory but generated out of the imagination."

"Come, Benjamin, put your arm around me and we shall be comfortably one, mon semblable—mon frère!"

"When I stand up from my writing desk, "John Banville", or "Benjamin Black" – that is, the one whose name will appear on the title page – vanishes on the instant, since he only existed while the writing was being done."

"Coming from a tiny island, it's very exciting to be at sea in Central Europe in the sense of vast stretches of land all around one. We don't get that in Ireland."

"I'm also lumbered with the title of being a writer's writer, which is the worst possible reputation you can have, because, of course, other writers don't read other writers except to gain evidence against them. And it puts readers off."

"I'm a little older now and I think I've lightened up a bit as I'm getting older."

"T. S. Eliot said it is no business of the artist to think. I presume he meant it's only the business of the artist to feel, but I like the notion of there being a mind behind the fiction that I read and that I write."

"Well, [Kepler] reminded me of myself – the little man running desperately in circles, trying to find an explanation for the world, for his place in it, to find a plausible system, to account for reality – and never finding it. Finding lots of rules and laws which are very important, but never actually finding his own way into what it is to be in the world – very much an existentialist before his time, I think."

"[W]e would probably claim Kafka as an Irish writer. His tone of voice is certainly quite Irish: that sense of melancholy, that sense of strangeness and of being a stranger in the world. I think that we empathise with that very much indeed."

"I suppose many people in Ireland would regard me as being more a European writer than an Irish writer. I don't think this is so."

"I don't know what citizens of Prague must feel about these endless lines of tourists tramping over their streets."

"I know that this is a cliché by now and I suppose that Prague people are sick and tired of hearing Prague referred to as ‘Magic Prague’, but, you know, I may complain about the tourists, but I am a tourist after all. I'd rather not be, but I am."

"I like to hide in Ireland, but I like to think of myself as an internal exile."

"A book at the very start comes to me as a nebulous geometric form, a kind of tension in space that has to be resolved. The resolution is effected by fleshing out the form with character, plot, dialogue, etc. But the original structure perseveres throughout, even when, or perhaps especially when, I am not conscious of it being at work. Art is a mysterious business."

"One of my mottoes as a writer is a little jotting from Kafka's journals: ‘Never again psychology!’ But alas, humankind is obsessed with its psychological workings, and since the novel can only treat of humankind . . . You see my predicament."

"One must try to keep a sensible perspective and not take oneself too seriously."

"My friends tell me I must stop saying in public that I ‘hate all my novels’. What I mean is that I am profoundly dissatisfied with everything I have done simply because it is not good enough by my standards. But my standard is perfection, and as we know, perfection is not allowed to such as us. On the other hand, I begin every new book in the complete conviction that this time, this time I shall get it right. Rationally I know this will not be so, but art has its reasons."

"A work of art is not about something, it is something, in the same way that life is not something that has meaning, only significance. And art's intentions are entirely innocent – no comment, no opinion, no attempted coercion. All – all! – art attempts to do is to quicken the sense of life, to make vivid for the reader the mysterious predicament of being alive for a brief span in this exquisite and terrible world."

"All art is to some extent shaped by what has gone before. But that is an organic process, not a conscious intention. Novels are made out of novels as much as they are out of life."

"Every artist has a Dorian Gray slaving away in the attic."

"When young writers approach me for advice, I remind them, as gently as I can, that they are on their own, with no help available anywhere."

"I was in Miami, reading at the book fair. My partner on the platform had won the Pulitzer Prize the previous day. At the book signing afterwards, Pulitzer Man had waiting for him a queue of admiring readers that stretched up the spine of Florida, while I had three people — an academic who was writing something on my work, the usual maniac in a raincoat, and a kindly chap who leaned down and said to me in a confidential whisper, “I'm not going to buy your book, but you looked so lonely I felt I had to come and talk to you.”"

"I write in what we call Hiberno-English, and it would be disastrous to lose my literary accent, as both Joyce and Beckett began to do in exile. In their case the unique tone of voice they each unwittingly adopted only made for a deeper poetic intensity; I suspect if I were to undergo a similar loss the result would not be so productive."

"I drive from home to my office, a small apartment on the river in the center of Dublin. I write there from 9 a.m. to lunchtime, I take a simple lunch—bread, cheese, nice cup of tea—work until 6 p.m., then home for dinner. Viewed from outside my head it is a singularly dull and uneventful day, but inside my head … aaah."

"Interviewer: What would you like carved onto your tombstone? Banville: I'd rather not have a tombstone."

"As a boy I was very solitary but blissfully happy. We lived on the edge of town in Wexford and I wandered the fields with my dog, declaiming Keats to the trees."

"I never learned the names of the streets because I couldn't wait to get out. It was too small and I was bored. I was a pretentious little twerp and I had ideas above my station, which everyone should have. I was deeply ambitious but I was deeply dismissive of what was there and that was a mistake. Wexford was a fascinating town and so was the society. I remember a friend of mine telling me about wife-swapping parties that went on there and how people would throw their keys into the middle of a bowl. This was the late 1950s. I didn't believe a word of it. If I believed him and looked about, I would have found another version of Wexford. I'm not saying that I wanted to be at wife-swapping parties, but the Wexford I imagined wasn't necessarily the Wexford that was real. So I blinded myself and I was just as narrow-minded and blinkered as the people whom I despised there. That was a mistake."

"I remember my father didn't say very much – he was a very laconic man. When he'd go to a party, he would become very animated. My mother would say – 'Look at him. He never says a word at home and look at him now.' This is how we all are."

"I don't know anything about myself. Put it this way, there is no self. I believe that we're a compendium of personalities. We're whoever we meet. We go through the day being who we think we should be and who we think we'd like to be."

"Look at what goes on in our heads when we think about our family or we think about sex. There are things in there that you'd never really say to anybody. You're even ashamed to think it yourself."

"If you think I'm being bleak, I'm not. It's wonderful to be making yourself up. That's what makes life so exciting. It's an unending adventure."

"I often think that there was nothing more exciting and erotic than getting a glimpse of a woman's leg at the top of her stockings. There's something about that white bulge and for anybody who grew up in my time, nothing replaces that, nothing. I remember I had a girlfriend when I was 16 and she had this bra – it used to open down the front – which I thought was absolutely wonderful. It was like opening a tabernacle."

"I like to dress conservatively because then the outrageous things you say are even more outrageous."

"I always thought when I got older that I'd be jealous of my children but I'm not. It's the opposite. I love seeing their possibilities. Nothing makes me as happy as sitting at dinner with loved ones, having a glass of wine with a meal that I've cooked. What could be better?"

"When I created Quirke, he was 6ft 6in and blond. But then a woman reader wrote to me and said, 'Why do you keep saying his hair is blond? It's not. It's brown.' I wrote back to her and told her that, of course, she was right. So I darkened his hair and now that he's being played by Gabriel Byrne; with each successive book he gets a bit smaller and smaller."

"Benjamin Black is a craftsman and these are crafted works. I'm very proud of them. I think they're well made, but Banville is doing something else – he's trying to make a kind of poetry, I suppose. I'm a perfectionist. It's an illness but a good illness. It's a completely different method of writing. Banville writes with a fountain pen on paper in a manuscript book and Black works straight on to the screen. It could take me a whole morning to write a few sentences as Banville, but as Black I'd be very annoyed if I didn't have at least two or three pages done. This drives crime-writers crackers because they think I'm saying that their craft is not worth it. I'm simply saying it's a different thing. I don't know why they worry when I talk about speed; after all, Georges Simenon wrote his books in about 10 days."

"[On The Sea being filmed] It's not a blockbuster and it's not going to earn half a billion in the first weekend, but it's a work of art and I'm very pleased with it."

"They filmed it down in Wexford and I visited the set for about half an hour. I don't usually go near the set, because there's nothing for a writer to do there and you're constantly getting in the way. If I give a book to the movies, it's theirs. Writers often whinge about being betrayed by the movies – I have no sympathy for that. If you don't want a movie to be made, then don't sell your book to the movies."

"When I won the Booker Prize, I said that it was nice to see a work of art winning this prize and I've never been forgiven for that. When you get a prize, you're suppose to be humble. Somebody was interviewing me and said, 'This is a great day for Ireland'. I said, 'Why? Ireland didn't do it, I did it.' I wasn't forgiven for that either. I don't wear the green jersey and I don't hobnob with Michael D in the Park, although I quite like Michael D."

"You can sense the volumes of Joyce, Beckett and Nabokov on Banville's shelves."

"Irish stylist springs Booker surprise [...] A 7-1 outsider in the betting odds and untipped by virtually any critic [...] The veteran Irish stylist John Banville brought off one of the biggest literary coups last night when he took the £50,000 Booker Prize from under the noses of the bookies and the literary insiders."

"Possibly the most perverse decision in the history of the award."

"Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence."

"He [Finny] had never been jealous of me for a second. Now I knew that there never was and never could have been any rivalry between us. I was not of the same quality as he."

"He possessed an extra vigor, a heightened confidence in himself, a serene capacity for affection which saved him. Nothing as he was growing up at home, nothing at Devon, nothing even about the war had broken his harmonious and natural unity. So at last I had."

"I lost part of myself to him then, and a soaring sense of freedom revealed that this must have been my purpose from the first: to become a part of Phineas."

"Now I see what racing skiing is all about. It's all right to miss seeing the trees and the countryside and all the other things when you've got to be in a hurry. And when you're in a war you've got to be in a hurry. Don't you? So I guess maybe racing skiers weren't ruining the sport after all. They were preparing it, if you see what I mean, for the future. Everything has to evolve or else it perishes. . . I'm almost glad this war came along. It's like a test, isn't it, and only the things and the people who've been evolving the right way survive."

"Stranded in this mill town railroad yard while the whole world was converging elsewhere, we seemed to be nothing but children playing among heroic men."

"You had to be rude at least sometimes and edgy often to be credited with 'personality,' and without that accolade no one at Devon could be anyone. No one, with the exception of course of Phineas."

"Naturally I don't believe books and I don't believe teachers, but I do believe-it's important for me to believe you [Gene]. Christ, I've got to believe you, at least. I know you better than anybody."

"Your war memories will be with you forever, you'll be asked about them thousands of times after the war is over. People will get their respect for you from that-partly from that, don't get me wrong-but if you can say that you were up front where there was some real shooting going on, then that will mean a whole lot to you in years to come."

"It seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart."

"All of them, all except Phineas, constructed at infinite cost to themselves these Maginot Lines against this enemy they thought they saw across the frontier, this enemy who never attacked that way-if he ever attacked at all; if he was indeed the enemy."

"I set my hand to the art of writing early on. Publishing was easy for me, and I at once found favor and understanding. But it was a long time before I realized and convinced myself that this was anything but mere chance. Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb. Your first book already defines you, while you are really far from being defined. And this definition is something you may then carry with you for the rest of your life, trying to confirm it or extend or correct or deny it; but you can never eliminate it."

"He was carried away by that mania of the storyteller, who never knows which stories are more beautiful—the ones that really happened and the evocation of which recalls a whole flow of hours past, of petty emotions, boredom, happiness, insecurity, vanity, and self-disgust, or those which are invented, and in which he cuts out a main pattern, and everything seems easy, then begins to vary it as he realizes more and more that he is describing again things that had happened or been understood in lived reality."

"In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of the written language."

"Then we have computer science. It is true that software cannot exercise its powers of lightness except through the weight of hardware. But it is the software that gives the orders, acting on the outside world and on machines that exist only as functions of software and evolve so that they can work out ever more complex programs. The second industrial revolution, unlike the first, does not present us with such crushing images as rolling mills and molten steel, but with "bits" in a flow of information traveling along circuits in the form of electronic impulses. The iron machines still exist, but they obey the orders of weightless bits."

"Gore is a man without an unconscious."

"What makes love making and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space"

"And in that moment we all thought of the space that her round arms would occupy moving backward and forward with the rolling pin over the dough, her bosom leaning over the great mound of flour and eggs, [...] and we thought of the space the flour would occupy, and the wheat for the flour, and the fields to raise the wheat, and the mountains from which the water would flow to irrigate the fields; [...] of the space it would take for the Sun to arrive with its rays, to ripen the wheat; of the space for the Sun to condense from the clouds of stellar gases and burn; of the quantities of stars and galaxies and galactic masses in flight through space which would be needed to hold suspended every galaxy, every nebula, every sun, every planet, and at the same time we thought of it, this space was inevitably being formed, at the same time that Mrs. Ph(i)Nk0 was uttering those words: "… ah, what noodles, boys!" the point that contained her and all of us was expanding in a halo of distance in light-years and light-centuries and billions of light-millennia, and we were being hurled to the four corners of the universe, [...] and she, dissolved into I don't know what kind of energy-light-heat, she, Mrs. Ph(i)Nk0, she who in the midst of our closed, petty world had been capable of a generous impulse, "Boys, the noodles I would make for you!," a true outburst of general love, initiating at the same moment the concept of space and, properly speaking, space itself, and time, and universal gravitation, and the gravitating universe, making possible billions and billions of suns, and of planets, and fields of wheat, and Mrs. Ph(i)Nk0s, scattered through the continents of the planets, kneading with floury, oil-shiny, generous arms, and she lost at that very moment, and we, mourning her loss."

"And he waves the pages of the papers, black and white the way space was when the galaxies were being formed, and crammed—as space was then—with isolated corpuscles, surrounded by emptiness, containing no destination or meaning. And I think how beautiful it was then, through that void, to draw lines and parabolas, pick out the precise point, the intersection between space and time where the event would spring forth, undeniable in the prominence of its glow; whereas now events come flowing down without interruption, like cement being poured, one column next to the other, one within the other, separated by black and incongruous headlines...."

"As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands. (di quest'onda che rifluisce dai ricordi la città s'imbeve coma una spugna e si dilata). The city, however, does not tell of its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand..."

"With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else."

"Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me." Polo answers: "Without stones there is no arch."

"The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."

"In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn't Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out:"

"If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space."

"Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be."

"Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful to me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust."

"Both Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges have contributed greatly to our understanding of the fantastic. Calvino in his book, The Uses of Literature says, "I leave the critics the task of placing my novels and short stories within or outside of some classification of Fantasy. For me, the main thing in a narrative is not the explanation of an extraordinary event, but the order of things that this extraordinary event produces in itself and around it; the patterns of symmetry, the network of images deposited around it as in the formation of a crystal." (The Uses of Literature, New York: Norton, 1979, p. 73)"

"Italo Calvino, in The Uses of Literature, said that "the more technological our houses, the more their walls ooze ghosts." What does that mean? It means that the more abstract our dealings with each other, the more mysteries are created. The more mysteries, the more questions, and that's where the storyteller steps in."

"For me Calvino is one of the most wonderful writers, and the magic in his work is something that has been an influence"

"As for Calvino, I have to say honestly that I love especially his earlier work, his stories, his fiction up to and including Invisible Cities—a very beautiful book which I adore. I love less what came after Invisible Cities. The more recent work seems to me too cerebral. But then, that’s just my personal preference, and it is hard to convince readers about what is most authentic in someone’s work. Recently a book by Calvino was published posthumously, a book called La Strada di San Giovanni. In this book there is a beautiful story—the title story, in fact—which is a sort of memoir written in 1965 or so—which he never thought to publish. And there are other wonderful pieces in that collection."

"During the last quarter century Italo Calvino has advanced far beyond his American and English contemporaries. As they continue to look for the place where the spiders make their nests, Calvino has not only found this special place but learned how himself to make fantastic webs of prose to which all things adhere."

"Year after year, I and thousands of members of PEN [an international association that promotes cooperation among writers in the interests of international goodwill and freedom of expression] voted for Jorge Luis Borges, who was the obvious international candidate for the Nobel. They would not consider him. They didn't like his politics. I was shocked that Italo Calvino never got it. It seems they never give it to the really risky writers."

"There is an assumption that everything called genre is secondary. This is simply untrue. Are writers such as Marquez, Borges, or Calvino automatically second-rate because they aren't writing realistic literature or mainstream fiction?"

"Reading Calvino, you're constantly assailed by the notion that he is writing down what you have always known, except that you've never thought of it before. This is highly unnerving; fortunately, you're usually too busy laughing to go mad. I can think of no finer writer to have beside me while Italy explodes, Britain burns, while the world ends"

"[p]eople who go to Wikipedia to get ideas for whom to hire, or honor, or read, and look at that list of 'American Novelists' for inspiration ... might simply use that list without thinking twice about it."

"I am a man without many pleasures in life, a man whose few pleasures are small, but a man whose small pleasures are very important to him. One of them is eating. One reading. Another eating while reading."

"I bring Laura to the edge of the clapping crowd, and I watch her sink, becoming engulfed in the sea of clapter."

"For months I had been trying to be less myself."

""My gift to you will be to take away your freedom of choice for a while. Freedom can be very unhealthy and unproductive. Instead, you’ll have freedom from choice.”"

"Lynn stalked. She had taken up stalking for health reasons, but it was not paying off as handsomely as she had hoped."

"“One of my greatest pleasures in life is promising myself I will not drink, or smoke, or take coke, or do heroin, or eat cookies, then doing it. It’s a pleasure that can be repeated daily.”"

"Reality is so dull, Alan thought. Any mistake in one’s perception of it is inevitably more interesting than the real thing, and lucky are those who remain uninformed of their error."

"His body was now very close to hers, and he dared to bring his hand under her skirt. “Where is your underwear?” he asked. “I lost it.” “Where?” “In the garden. It fell off when I was spying. I didn’t have time to retrieve it.”"

"The intention appears to be to create a list of ‘American Novelists’ on Wikipedia that is made up almost entirely of men. The category lists 3,837 authors, and the first few hundred of them are mainly men."

"It had always seemed to Louis that a fundamental desire to take postal courses was being sublimated by other people into sexual activity."

"I like the English. They have the most rigid code of immorality in the world."

"With sociology one can do anything and call it work."

"I've often thought that my scruples about stealing books were the only thing that stood in the way of my being a really great scholar."

"Reading someone else's newspaper is like sleeping with someone else's wife. Nothing seems to be precisely in the right place, and when you find what you are looking for, it is not clear then how to respond to it."

"My experience of ships is that on them one makes an interesting discovery about the world. One finds one can do without it completely."

"Well," said Dr Jochum, "you are like all reformers. You like to reform the world because it is easier than trying to reform yourself."

"[A]nd the traffic noise that boomed in through the window was another reminder of what his spirit knew, that he was but a grain of sand in someone else's desert."

"Well, yes, surely I think everybody ought to enjoy life as much as it's humanly possible because that's why we exist. I believe."

"We got a course in picknicking at the university," said Dr. Bourbon. "It's called Geology, but it's really picknicking."

"The English are polite by telling lies. The Americans are polite by telling the truth."

"You see, you are an optimist and live on hope. I am a pessimist and live on experience."

"Jochum had said, "You keep asking the universe 'How ought I to live?' But it can't answer.""

"'Oh, everybody exploits somebody,' says Howard, 'in this social order it's part of the human lot.'"

"'Look, Felicity,' says Howard, 'there's only one rule. Follow the line of your own desires.'"

"'All action leads to suffering, someone else's, or one's own.'"

"'The trouble is, it's hard to know you're little,' says Felicity. 'People like to make themselves matter.'"

"'I think, George,' says Merion, ' the trouble is that you don't have a conflict model of society.'"

"'It must be nice to think there is a true reality,' says Miss Callendar. 'I've always found reality a matter of great debate.'"

"To you liberals, of course, goats are just sheep from broken homes."

"In Slaka, sex is just politics with the clothes off."

"The better class of Briton likes to send his children away to school until they're old and intelligent enough to come home again. Then they're too old and intelligent to want to."

"Genitals are a great distraction to scholarship."

"A conventional good read is usually a bad read, a relaxing bath in what we know already. A true good read is surely an act of innovative creation in which we, the readers, become conspirators."

"Alone dwells every man and everyone mocks everyone else, and a deserted island is our pain."

"Yes, the words, the land of my birth, they console me and compensate, but they would not bring me my mother back."

"Go away, image of my living mother, full of life, as I saw her in France for the last time. Go away! My mother's ghost."

"In my solitude I sing to myself a sweet lullaby, as sweet as my mother used to sing to me."

"I say to myself that her small hands are no more worm, and that I would never again carry them soft to my front."

"Never again I would know her slow kisses which are hardly felt. Never again the ringing mourning bells, songs of the dead that we loved."

"Human friends, friends in hardship and in life, this is our pure love, love of mother and son."

"My true single consolation is that she is not present to see me in my agony of her death."

"In my sleep, which is the song of the tombs, I have just seen her again, as beautiful as in her youth."

"She answers no more, the one who used to answer always."

"She does not talk anymore, the one who used to talk so pleasantly."

"With her alone I could be far away from everyone."

"Only with her I was not alone, now I am alone with everyone."

"Brothers, my human brothers, force me to believe in eternal life."

"The night-sea journey may be absurd, but here we swim, will-we nill-we, against the flood, onward and upward, toward a Shore that may not exist and couldn't be reached if it did."

"Marilyn Marsh, who had about had it with Spain, declared to him [the old Spanish man]: … But it redounds to your national credit, the then Missus Turner went on in effect — she'd been reading up on reciprocal atrocities in the Guerra Civil — that the sunny Spanish could never be guilty of an Auschwitz, for example. In the first place, your ovens would have died, like our kitchen stove, instead of your Jews, whom you'd got rid of anyhow in the sunny Fifteenth century, no? And in the second place the whole idea of extermination camps would've been too impersonal for your exquisite Moorish tastes. Much more agradable to push folks off a cliff one at a time into a gorgeous Mediterranean sunset, as you did near Malaga — three hundred, was it, or three thousand? Or to rape and then kill a convent-full of nuns in the manner of the saint of their choice — was that Barcelona or Valencia?"

"One of the things I miss about teaching is that students would tell me what I ought to read. One of my students, back in the 1960s, put me onto Borges, and I remember another mentioning Flann O'Brien's At Swim Two-Birds in the same way."

"Women thought me charmingly shy, and sometimes stopped at nothing to “penetrate the disdainful shell of my fear,” as one of their number put it. Often as not, it was they who got penetrated."

"[N]othing is intrinsically valuable; the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it, from outside, by people."

"[T]here is no will-o'-the-wisp so elusive as the cause of any human act."

"[I]t is sometimes pleasant to stone a martyr, no matter how much we may admire him."

"More history's made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills, and proclamations."

"'Tis e'er the wont of simple folk to prize the deed and o'erlook the motive, and of learned folk to discount the deed and lay open the soul of the doer."

"'Tis e'er the lot of the innocent in the world to fly to the wolf for succor from the lion."

"Is a man a salvage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile manners? Or is salvagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse?"

"Consider that if the novelist is like God and a novel like the universe, then the converse ought to have at least some some metaphorical truth: The universe is a novel; God is a novelist! (I have observed elsewhere that the trouble with God is not that He's a bad novelist; only that He's a realistic one, and that dates Him.) [Footnote:] But also keeps bringing Him back into fashion."

"I don't think it's a good idea, as a rule, for artists to explain their art, even if they can. Jorge Luis Borges puts it arrogantly: God shouldn't stoop to theology. A modern painter put it more politely and poetically: Birds have no need of ornithology."

"[T]he vocation of writing seriously involves the continuous and deep examination of one's own experience of life and the world, and of the language and literary conventions we use to register that experience and make it meaningful."

"The simple burden of my essay ["The Literature of Exhaustion"] was that the forms and modes of art live in human history and are therefore subject to used-upness, at least in the minds of significant numbers of artists in particular times and places: in other words, that artistic conventions are likely to be retired, subverted, transcended, transformed, or even deployed against themselves to generate new and lively work. I would have thought that point unexceptionable. But a great many people … mistook me to mean that literature, at least fiction, is kaput …That is not what I meant at all. … [L]et me say at once and plainly that …literature can never be exhausted, if only because no single literary text can ever be exhausted — its "meaning" residing as it does in its transactions with individual readers over time, space, and language. …What my essay "The Literature of Exhaustion" was really about, so it seems to me now, was the effective "exhaustion" not of language or of literature, but of the aesthetic of high modernism: that admirable, not-to-be-repudiated, but essentially completed "program" of what Hugh Kenner has dubbed "the Pound era." In 1966/67 we scarcely had the term postmodernism in its current literary-critical usage — at least I hadn't heard it yet — but a number of us, in quite different ways and with varying combinations of intuitive response and conscious deliberation, were already well into the working out, not of the next-best thing after modernism, but of the best next thing: what is gropingly now called postmodernist fiction; what I hope might also be thought of one day as a literature of replenishment."

"I have remarked elsewhere that I regard the Almighty as not a bad novelist, except that He is a realist."

"We tell stories and listen to them because we live stories and live in them."

"The story of our life is not our life. It is our story."

"A book is what gets me off: something with heft to it, that you can take in two hands and spread like a woman. Mnyum!"

"[G]ood readers read the lines and better readers read the spaces."

"A "limited imagination," as I understand it, gets things wrong. From its mere incapacity, like limited intelligence or limited physical strength, it fails to anticipate accurately and to come up with the really new or more effective idea. Never mind that even the most powerful imagination may not be literally unlimited. … In the literary sphere, limited imagination is likely to be limited to the most conventional and obvious: a mere lack of originality in the material, the form, the treatment."

"Our ability to experience life may be more or less limited by inexperience of art as well as vice versa, since each tends to increase the wattage of the great illuminator of both — namely the imagination."

"Life teaches the storyteller his themes and subject matter; literature teaches him how to get a handle on them: what has been done already, what might be done differently, what's a story anyway, and what is to be found in the existing inventory of situations, attitudes, characters, tonalities, forms, and effects accumulated over four thousand years of written literature."

"[While] we have only one life, nevertheless that one life ("that massive datum," John Updike calls it in his memoir Self-Consciousness) lends itself to any number of stories — and I'm speaking here not of fabrications but of sincere, straightforward factual accounts. Another way to put it is that any life's story can be told in any number of ways, depending on the teller's "handle," or angle of view, or lens. In fact, of course, the same applies to fictional characters: people made out of words in a novel or words and images on a screen."

"[A]rtistic Meisterstücken, even less-than-Meisterstücken, have always been points of departure for "solitary meditation and contemplation," to a degree depending, I suppose, on the particular Meisterstück, the particular reader, viewer, or auditor, and the particular circumstances of their encounter."

"There is a popular misconception of the Romantics as rebelling against all formal constraints in favor of untrammeled freedom (as in their fondness for "wild" gardens" around those "broken" columns), and indeed we have heard Schlegel's Julius explicitly rejecting "all that … we call 'order'" in his Lucinde project. But it is clear that in fact he and his creator have a veritable passion for form — in Wallace Stevens's famous phrasing, a "rage for order" — and that what they're rejecting is only certain "conventions" of order and form. I prefer to think of Schlegel as a "romantic formalist" — a term that I apply to myself as well — and I will venture to say that the principal difference between Romantic romantic formalism and Postmodernist romantic formalism is that the latter, more than the former, inclines to the ironic (though impassioned) reorchestration of older conventions — including the classical and the neoclassical — rather than to their rejection in favor of "new" forms."

"[O]ne does not write a truly contemporary novel … merely by writing about contemporary matters. … One writes a contemporary novel by writing it in a contemporary way."

"The Romantics enthusiastically and optimistically rejected neoclassical forms; the Postmodernists are just as likely to embrace such forms, although the embrace is seldom unskeptical or unironic, however impassioned it may be underneath its coolness."

"[T]he essentially human characteristic of general intellectual curiosity interests itself in the demonstration of previously unremarked interconnections between apparently disparate phenomena, as part of our ongoing project of making sense of the world. Somewhat different, and more rigorous, is the novelist's So what? … [T]he best artists have a keenly intelligent feel, however intuitive, for just [such] demonstrable interconnections …, and for the relevance of those interconnections not only to their own artistic practice but to the circumstance of being humanly alive and vigorously sentient in a particular historical time and place."

"The ascendancy of the novel is historically associated with the ascendancy of the middle class and the spread of general literacy, and those in turn, in the West at least, with the development of the institutions of liberal democracy and the civil state. … No doubt I am being both biased and superstitious, but because of that historical connection I think of the novel (and, by extension, of general literacy) as a canary in the coal mines of democratic civil society. … If this particular canary really does go belly-up, I'm old-fashioned enough to fear for the general civic air."

"[R]eading a splendid writer, or even just a very entertaining writer, is not a particularly passive business. An accomplished artist is giving us his or her best shots, in what she or he regards as their most effective sequence—of words, of actions, of foreshadowings and plot-twists and insights and carefully prepared dramatic moments. It's up to us to respond to those best shots with our minds and hearts and spirits and our accumulated experience of life and of art."

"[B]y writing an Aenead that combines an Odyssey with an Iliad, Virgil gives the impression of wanting to outdo the Homer of whom he is the self-conscious heir and to whom his Latin epic is also a homage, just as Augustan Rome is at once the cultural heir and political master of classical Greece. You want to be a great epic poet? Here are your models. Virgil follows them—programmatically but not slavishly—and because he happens to be a great epic poet, his Aenead turns out to be not a monumental Case-1 imitation of the great model, but a great epic poem. Thirteen centuries later, Dante compounds the stunt, taking as his literal and figurative guide not "unselfconscious" Homer but self-conscious (and Homer-conscious) Virgil, and not only scripts himself into the wandering hero role but orchestrates his own welcome … into the company of the immortals—in a Limbo, moreover, where they must ineluctably remain, but from which he will proceed through Purgatory to Paradise. Talk about chutzpah! Happening to be a great poet, Dante brings the thing off."

"As instanced by Virgil and Dante, the vocation of artisthood bears some analogy to those of mythic-herohood and messiahship—conspicuously so for the Romantics and the great early Modernists, with their characteristic conception of the artist as hero (one recalls James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, originally named Stephen Hero, vowing to "forge, in the smithy of my soul, the uncreated conscience of my race"), more modestly so even for Postmoderns. In at least some cases, the present author's included, one's apprentice sense of calling may be far from clear. even to oneself. … One may be uncertain of both one's vocation and one's talent for it, or confident of one of those but not the other, or confident of both but mistaken, or doubtful of both but mistaken, or correct on one or both counts. In the happiest case, one comes to have reasonable faith in both calling and gift and at least some "objective" confirmation that that faith is not altogether misplaced. But "real, non-scripted life" is slippery terrain, in which templates and prophecies are ill-defined, elastic, arguable, and verdicts are forever subject to reversal. One crosses one's fingers, invokes one's muse and does one's best."

"So what's to be said … for a curriculum devoted to a study of a more-or-less-agreed-upon roster of "the best that has been thought and said," in Matthew Arnold's famous formulation — or at least as representatively much of that Best as the ever-evolving consensus of a good college faculty believes can be fruitfully addressed between undergraduate matriculation and the baccalaureate?Well: what's to be said for it, needless to say, is that it not only edifies and instructs — any good old curriculum does that — but permits discourse within a shared frame of reference richer and more stable than this season's pop music, films, and TV shows, which a colleague of mine used to lament were the only points of cultural reference that he could assume to be shared by his undergraduate students."

"The Tragic View of liberal education is that even at its best, … it is so necessarily, unavoidably limited that all it can attempt is to afford us some experience of, for example, informed close reading and critical thinking, and to make us aware that there remain continents of knowledge out there that one lifetime could scarcely scratch the surface of, even were we to devote it all to reading and studying — which we must not, since education comes so much from hands-on doing and experiencing as well as from reading and study."

"[T]o a greater or lesser extent our knowledge even of close kin is often fragmentary, inferred like a fossil skeleton or an ancient vase from whatever always-limited experience and shards of memory we have of them."

"I got a lot of encouragement there from John Barth, a genius, a superb teacher"

"[Johns] Hopkins had this very postmodernist slant. You couldn't help but be really influenced by this emphasis on the text, on experimental texts. People were fascinated with Robert Coover and Thomas Pynchon, and John Barth was there, and the focus was on that, which I found very helpful."

"[F]or me, self-consciousness vitiates creation. A writer like John Barth deliberately plays with self-consciousness; I doubt that Barth thinks much of my writing, and I don't take pleasure in his, but I know he knows what he's doing and I respect him for it."

"For Beatrice--Darling, dearest, dead."

"It is very useful, when one is young, to learn the difference between "literally" and "figuratively." If something happens literally, it actually happens; if something happens figuratively, it feels like it is happening. If you are literally jumping for joy, for instance, it means you are leaping in the air because you are very happy. If you are figuratively jumping for joy, it means you are so happy that you could jump for joy, but are saving your energy for other matters."

"Lemony Snicket"

"When you were very small, perhaps someone read to you the insipid story —the word "insipid" here means "not worth reading to someone" of the Boy Who Cried Wolf. A very dull boy, you may remember, cried "Wolf!" when there was no wolf, and the gullible villagers ran to rescue him only to find the whole thing was a joke. Then he cried "Wolf!" when it wasn't a joke, and the villagers didn't come running, and the boy was eaten and the story, thank goodness, was over. The story's moral, of course, ought to be "Never live somewhere where wolves are running around loose," but whoever read you the story probably told you that the moral was not to lie. This is an absurd moral, for you and I both know that sometimes not only is it good to lie, it is necessary to lie. For example, it was perfectly appropriate, after Violet left the Reptile Room, for Sunny to crawl over to the cage that held the Incredibly Deadly Viper, unlatch the cage, and begin screaming as loudly as she could even though nothing was really wrong."

"For Beatrice--I would much prefer it if you were alive and well."

"Violet: You are being unbearable, with a U!"

"Oftentimes, when people are miserable, they will want to make other people miserable, too. But it never helps. -Lemony Snicket"

"There are few sights sadder than a ruined book. -Lemony Snicket"

"If you are allergic to a thing, it is best not to put that thing in your mouth, particularly if the thing is cats. -Lemony Snicket"

"Stealing, of course, is a crime, and a very impolite thing to do. But like most impolite things, it is excusable under certain circumstances. Stealing is not excusable if, for instance, you are in a museum and you decide that a certain painting would look better in your house, and you simply grab the painting and take it there. But if you were very, very hungry, and you had no way of obtaining money, it might be excusable to grab the painting, take it to your house, and eat it. -Lemony Snicket"

"There are two kinds of fears: rational and irrational- or, in simpler terms, fears that make sense and fears that don't. For instance, the Baudelaire orphans have a fear of Count Olaf, which makes perfect sense, because he is an evil man who wants to destroy them. But if they were afraid of lemon meringue pie, this would be an irrational fear, because lemon meringue pie is delicious and would never hurt a soul. Being afraid of a monster under the bed is perfectly rational, because there may in fact be a monster under your bed at any time, ready to eat you all up, but fear of realtors is an irrational fear. Realtors, as I'm sure you know, are people who assist in the buying and selling of houses. Besides occasionally wearing an ugly yellow coat, the worst a realtor can do to you is show you a house that you find ugly, so it is completely irrational to be terrified of them. -Lemony Snicket"

"To Beatrice--My love flew like a butterfly, Until death swooped down like a bat, As the poet Emma Montana McElroy said: That's the end of that."

"I’m sure you have heard it said that appearance does not matter so much and that it is what's on the inside that counts. This is, of course, utter nonsense, because if it were true then people who were good on the inside would never have to comb their hair or take a bath, and the whole world would smell even worse than it already does. -Lemony Snicket"

"The moral of 'The Three Bears,' for instance, is 'Never break into someone else's house." The moral of "Snow White" is "Never eat apples." The moral of World War One is "Never assassinate Archduke Ferdinand". -Lemony Snicket"

"Dear Reader,"

"I hope, for your sake, that you have not chosen to read this book because you are in the mood for a pleasant experience. If this is the case, I advise you to put this book down instantaneously, because of all the books describing the unhappy lives of the Baudelaire orphans, The Miserable Mill might be the unhappiest yet. Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire are sent to Paltryville to work in a lumber mill, and they find disaster and misfortune lurking behind every log."

"The pages of this book, I'm sorry to inform you, contain such unpleasantries as a giant pincer machine, a bad casserole, a man with a cloud of smoke where his head should be, a hypnotist, a terrible accident resulting in injury, and coupons."

"I have promised to write down the entire history of these three poor children, but you haven't, so if you prefer stories that are more heartwarming, please feel free to make another selection."

"With all due respect,"

"Klaus: Yes, sir."

"Violet: Sir?"

"For Beatrice--You will always be in my heart, in my mind, and in your grave. -Lemony Snicket"

"Get out of my way, you cakesniffers! -Carmelita Spats"

"Shyness is a very curious thing, because, like quicksand, it can strike people are any time, and also, like quicksand, it usually makes its victims look down."

"The expression "Making a mountain out of a molehill" simply means making a big deal out of something that is actually a small deal, and it is easy to see how this expression came about. Molehills are simply mounds of earth serving as condominiums for moles, and they have never caused anyone harm except for maybe a stubbed toe if you were walking around the wilderness without any shoes on. Mountains, however, are very large mounds of earth and are constantly causing problems. They are very tall, and when people try to climb them they often fall off, or get lost and die of starvation. Sometimes, two countries fight over who really owns a mountain, and thousands of people have to go to war and come home grumpy or wounded. And, of course, mountains serve as homes to mountain goats and mountain lions, who enjoy attacking helpless picnickers and eating sandwiches or children. So when someone is making a mountain out of a molehill, they are pretending that something is as horrible as a war or a ruined picnic when it is really only as horrible as a stubbed toe."

"Assumptions are dangerous things to make, and like all dangerous things to make--bombs for instance, or strawberry shortcake--if you make even the tiniest mistake you can find yourself in terrible trouble. Making assumptions simply means believing things are a certain way with little or no evidence that shows you are correct, and you can see how this can lead to terrible trouble. For instance, one morning you might wake up and make the assumption that your bed was in the same place that it always was, even though you would have no real evidence that this was so. But when you got out of your bed, you might discover that it has floated out to sea, and now you would be in terrible trouble all because of the incorrect assumption that you'd made. You can see that it is better not to make too many assumptions, particularly in the morning."

"If you are looking for a story about cheerful youngsters spending a jolly time at boarding school, look elsewhere. Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire are intelligent and resourceful children, and you might expect that they would do very well at school. Don't. For the Baudelaires, school turns out to be another miserable episode in their unlucky lives."

"Truth be told, within the chapters that make up this dreadful story, the children will face snapping crabs, strict punishments, dripping fungus, comprehensive exams, violin recitals, S.O.R.E., and the metric system. Most of all The worst thing that can happen to their friends, (Quagmires)"

"It is my solemn duty to stay up all night researching and writing the history of these three hapless youngsters, but you may be more comfortable getting a good night's sleep. In that case, you should probably choose some other book."

"Klaus: Maybe I don't know what "cakesniffer" means, but I think I can translate our new school's motto... If I'm not mistaken, "Memento Mori" means "Remember you will die"."

"For Beatrice--When we met, my life began. Soon afterward, yours ended"

"The world 'bubble' is in the dictionary, as is the word 'peacock,' the word 'vacation,' and the words 'the,' 'author's,' 'execution,' 'has,' 'been,' 'canceled,' which make up a sentence that is always pleasant to hear. So, if you were to read the dictionary, rather than this book, you could skip the parts about 'nervous' and 'anxious' and read about things that wouldn't keep you up all night, weeping and tearing your hair out. But this book is not a dictionary, and if you were to skip the parts about 'nervous' and 'anxious' you would be skipping the most pleasant parts of the entire story. Nowhere in this book will you find the words 'bubble,' 'peacock,' 'vacation,' or, unfortunately for me, anything about an execution being canceled."

"If you were to take a plastic bag and place it inside a large bowl, and then, using a wooden spoon, stir the bag around, you could use the expression 'a mixed bag' to describe what you had in front of you, but you would not be using the expression in the same way I am about to use it now. Although 'a mixed bag' sometimes refers to a plastic bag that has been stirred in a bowl, more often, it is used to describe a situation that has both good parts and bad parts. An afternoon movie theater, for example, would be a mixed bag if your favorite movie were showing, but if you had to eat gravel instead of popcorn. A trip to the zoo would be a very mixed bag if the weather were beautiful, but all the man and woman-eating lions were running around loose."

"If you are ever forced to take a chemistry class, you will probably see, at the front of the classroom, a large chart divided into squares, with different numbers and letters in each of them. This chart is called the table of elements, and scientists like to say that it contains all the substances that make up our world. Like everyone else, scientists are wrong from time to time, and it is easy to see that they are wrong about the table of elements. Because although this table contains a great many elements, from the element oxygen, which is found in the air, to the element of aluminum, which is found in cans of soda, the table of elements does not contain one of the most powerful elements that make up our world, and that is the element of surprise. The element of surprise is not a gas like oxygen, or a solid, like aluminum. The element of surprise is an unfair advantage, and it can be found in situations in which one person has sneaked up on another. The surprised person - or, in this sad case, the surprised person - are too stunned to defend themselves and the sneaky person has the advantage of the element of surprise."

"As the official representative of Lemony Snicket in all legal, literary, and social matters, I am often asked difficult questions, even when I am in a hurry. Recently, the most common questions have been the following:"

"Dear Diary,"

"I didn't realize this was a sad occasion. — The waiter at The Anxious Clown Restaurant"

"Why do so many things end in fire?"

"What can be hidden in a book?"

"On the day you officially join the organization, you will hear a noise outside your home. It may sound like the howl of a wolf, the chirping of a cricket, the engine of an automobile, the keys of a typewriter, the striking of a match, or the turning of a page. The noise will come in the middle of the night, the middle of the morning, or, in very rare cases, late in the afternoon. Ask your parents what the noise was. If they reply 'nothing,' they are replying in code, because there is never 'nothing' outside one's home. If you are interested in volunteering, answer your parents with the following question: 'If there's nothing out there, what was that noise?' We will be listening and will know it is safe to act. — V.F.D."

"As the aphorism says, If you have to ask, you can't afford it."

"For Beatrice--When we were together I felt breathless. Now, you are.-Lemony Snicket"

"Just about everything in this world is easier said than done, with the exception of ‘systematically assisting Sisyphus’s stealthy, Syst-susceptible sister,’ which is easier done than said. - Lemony Snicket"

"No matter who you are, no matter where you live, and no matter how many people are chasing you, what you don't read is often as important as what you do read. For instance, if you are walking in the mountains, and you don't read the sign that says "Beware of Cliff" because you were busy reading a joke book instead, you may suddenly find yourself walking on air rather than on a sturdy bed of rocks. If you are baking a pie for your friends, and you read an article entitled "How to Build a Chair" instead of a cookbook, your pie will probably end up tasting like wood and nails instead of like crust and fruity filling. And if you insist on reading this book instead of something more cheerful, you will most certainly find yourself moaning in despair instead of wriggling with delight, so if you have any sense at all you will put this book down and pick up another one. I know of a book, for instance, called The Littlest Elf, which tells the story of a teensy-weensy little man who scurries around fairyland having all sorts of adorable adventures, and you can see at once that you should probably read The Littlest Elf and wriggle over the lovely things that happened to this imaginary creature in a made-up place, instead of reading this book and moaning over the terrible things that have happened to the three Baudelaire orphans. - Lemony Snicket"

"A newspaper, as I'm sure you know, is a collection of supposedly true stories written down by writers who either saw them happen or talked to people who did. These writers are called journalists, and like telephone operators, butchers, ballerinas, and people who clean up after horses, journalists can sometimes make mistakes. - Lemony Snicket"

"When you traveling by bus, it is always difficult to decide whether you should sit in a seat by the window, a seat on the aisle, or a seat in the middle. If you take an aisle seat, you have the advantage of being able to stretch your legs whenever you like, but you have the disadvantage of people walking by you, and they can accidentally step on your toes or spill something on your clothing. If you take a window seat, you have the advantage of getting a clear view of the scenery, but you have the disadvantage of watching insects die as they hit the glass. If you take the middle seat, you have neither of these advantages, and you have the added disadvantage of people leaning all over you when they fall asleep. You can see at once why you should always hire a limousine or rent a mule rather than take the bus to your destination. - Lemony Snicket"

"Although "jumping to conclusions" is an expression, rather than an activity, it is as dangerous as jumping off a cliff, jumping in front of a moving train, and jumping for joy. If you jump off a cliff, you have a very good chance of experiencing a painful landing unless there is something below you to cushion your fall, such as a body of water or an immense pile of tissue paper. If you jump in front of a moving train, you have a very good chance of experiencing a painful voyage unless you are wearing some sort of train-proof suit. And if you jump for joy, you have a very good chance of experiencing a painful bump on the head, unless you make sure you are standing someplace with very high ceilings, which joyous people rarely do. Clearly, the solution to anything involving jumping is either to make sure you are jumping to a safe place, or not to jump at all. - Lemony Snicket"

"In this large and fierce world of ours, there are many, many unpleasant places to be. You can be in a river swarming with angry electric eels, or in a supermarket filled with vicious long-distance runners. You can be in a hotel that has no room service, or you can be lost in a forest that is slowly filling up with water. You can be in a hornet's nest or in an abandoned airport or the office of a pediatric surgeon, but one of the most unpleasant things that can happen is to find yourself in a quandary. - Lemony Snicket"

"Entertaining a notion, like entertaining a baby cousin or entertaining a pack of hyenas, is a dangerous thing to refuse to do. If you refuse to entertain a baby cousin, the baby cousin may get bored and entertain itself by wandering off and falling down a well. If you refuse to entertain a pack of hyenas, they may become restless and entertain themselves by devouring you. But if you refuse to entertain a notion--which is just a fancy way of saying that you refuse to think about a certain idea--you have to be much braver than someone who is merely facing some bloodthirsty animals, or some parents who are upset and find their little darling at the bottom of a well, because nobody knows what an idea will do when it goes off to entertain itself, particularly if the idea comes from a sinister villain. - Lemony Snicket"

"A cloud of dust is not a beautiful thing to look at. Very few painters have done portraits of huge clouds of dust or included them in their landscapes or still life. Film directors rarely choose huge clouds of dust to play the lead roles in romantic comedies, and as far as my research has shown, a huge cloud of dust has never placed higher than twenty-fifth in a beauty pageant. - Lemony Snicket"

"For Beatrice--Summers without you are as cold as winter. Winters without you are even colder.-Lemony Snicket"

"If you are like most people, you have an assortment of friends and family you can call upon in times of trouble. For instance, if you woke up in the middle of the night and saw a masked woman trying to crawl through your bedroom window, you might call your mother or father to help you push her back out. If you found yourself hopelessly lost in the middle of a strange city, you might ask the police to give you a ride home. And if you were an author locked in an Italian restaurant that was slowly filling up with water, you might call upon your acquaintances in the locksmith, pasta, and sponge businesses to come and rescue you."

"Of all the ridiculous expressions people use--and people use a great many ridiculous expressions--one of the most ridiculous is "No news is good news." "No news is good news" simply means that if you don't hear from someone, everything is probably fine, and you can see at once why this expression makes such little sense because everything being fine is only one of many, many reasons why someone may not contact you. Perhaps they are tied up. Maybe they are surrounded by fierce weasels, or perhaps they are wedged tightly between two refrigerators and cannot get themselves out. The expression might as well be changed to "no news is bad news," except that people may not be able to contact you because they have just been crowned king or are competing in a gymnastics tournament. The point is that there is no way to know why someone has not contacted you until they contact you and explain themselves. For this reason, the sensible expression would be "no news is no news," except that it is so obvious that it is hardly an expression at all."

"At this point in the dreadful story I am writing, I must interrupt for a moment and describe something that happened to a good friend of mine named Mr. Sirin. Mr. Sirin was a lepidopterist, a word which usually means "a person who studies butterflies." In this case, however, the word "lepidopterist" means "a man who was being pursued by angry government officials," and on the night I am telling you about they were right on his heels. Mr. Sirin looked back to see how close they were--four officers in their bright-pink uniforms, with small flashlights in their left hands and large nets in their right--and realized that in a moment they would catch up, and arrest him and his six favorite butterflies, which were frantically flapping alongside him. Mr. Sirin did not care much if he was captured--he had been in prison four and a half times over the course of his long and complicated life--but he cared very much about the butterflies. He realized that these six delicate insects would undoubtedly perish in bug prison, where poisonous spiders, stinging bees, and other criminals would rip them to shreds. So, as the secret police closed in, Mr. Sirin opened his mouth as wide as he could and swallowed all six butterflies whole, quickly placing them in the dark but safe confines of his empty stomach. It was not a pleasant feeling to have these six insects living inside him, but Mr. Sirin kept them there for three years, eating only the lightest foods served in prison so as not to crush the insects with a clump of broccoli or a baked potato. When his prison sentence was over, Mr. Sirin burped up the grateful butterflies and resumed his lepidoptery work in a community that was much more friendly to scientists and their specimens."

"Like all fairy tales, the story of Sleeping Beauty begins with "Once upon a time," and continues with a foolish young princess who makes a witch very angry, and then takes a nap until her boyfriend wakes her up with a kiss and insists on getting married, at which point the story ends with the phrase "happily ever after.""

"There are many things in this world I do not know. I do not know how butterflies get out of their cocoons without damaging their wings. I do not know why anyone would boil vegetables when roasting them is much tastier. I do not know how to make olive oil, and I do not know why dogs bark before an earthquake, and I do not know why some people voluntarily choose to climb mountains where it is freezing and difficult to breathe or live in the suburbs, where the coffee is watery and all of the houses look alike."

"Because of the information discussed on page nine, experts now suspect that there may in fact be one survivor of the fire, but the survivor's whereabouts are unknown."

"For Beatrice— Our love broke my heart, and stopped yours."

"The sad truth is that the truth is sad."

"It's hard for decent people to stay angry at someone who has burst into tears, which is why it is often a good idea to burst into tears if a decent person is yelling at you."

"One of the most troublesome things in life is that what you do or do not want has very little to do with what does or does not happen."

"Miracles are like meatballs because nobody knows what they are made of, where they came from, or how often they should appear."

"Besides getting several paper cuts in the same day or receiving the news that someone in your family has betrayed you to your enemies, one of the most unpleasant experiences in life is a job interview. It is very nerve-wracking to explain to someone all the things you can do in the hopes that they will pay you to do them. I once had a very difficult job interview in which I had not only to explain that I could hit an olive with a bow and arrow, memorize up to three pages of poetry, and determine if there was poison mixed into cheese fondue without tasting it, but I had to demonstrate all these things as well. In most cases, the best strategy for a job interview is to be fairly honest, because the worst thing that can happen is that you won't get the job and will spend the rest of your life foraging for food in the wilderness and seeking shelter underneath a tree or the awning of a bowling alley that has gone out of business, but in the case of the Baudelaire orphans' job interview with Madame Lulu, the situation was much more desperate. They could not be honest at all, because they were disguised as entirely different people, and the worst thing that could happen was being discovered by Count Olaf and his troupe and spending the rest of their lives in circumstances so terrible that the children could not bear to think of them."

"The story of the Baudelaires does not take place in a fictional land where lollipops grow on trees and singing mice do all of the chores. The story of the Baudelaires takes place in a very real world, where some people are laughed at just because they have something wrong with them, and where children can find themselves all alone in the world, struggling to understand the sinister mystery that surrounds them..."

"With the Baudelaire orphans, it was as if their grief were a very heavy object that they each took turns carrying so that they would not all be crying at once, but sometimes the object was too heavy for one of them to move without weeping, so Violet and Sunny stood next to Klaus, reminding him that this was something they could all carry together until at last, they found a safe place to lay it down."

"The world is a harum-scarum place." "Harum?" Sunny asked. It's complicated and confusing," Olivia explained. They say that long ago it was simple and quiet, but that might be a legend."

"Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like."

"Having an aura of menace is like having a pet weasel, because you rarely meet someone who has one, and when you do it makes you want to hide under the coffee table."

"Like handshakes, house pets, or raw carrots, many things are preferable when not slippery. Unfortunately, in this miserable volume, I am afraid that Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire run into more than their fair share of slipperiness during their harrowing journey up -- and down -- a range of strange and distressing mountains."

"In order to spare you any further repulsion, it would be best not to mention any of the unpleasant details of this story, particularly a secret message, a toboggan, a deceitful trap, a swarm of snow gnats, a scheming villain, a troupe of organized youngsters, a covered casserole dish, and a surprising survivor of a terrible fire."

"Unfortunately, I have dedicated my life to researching and recording the sad tale of the Baudelaire Orphans. There is no reason for you to dedicate yourself to such things, and you might instead dedicate yourself to letting this slippery book slip from your hands into a nearby trash receptacle, or deep pit."

"Violet said..."We've never known anyone who could remain so cheerful, no matter what terrible things occurred."

"To tell you the truth, I sometimes find it a bit tiresome," Fiona said..."

"My stepfather said that the amount of treachery in this world is enormous and that the best we could do was one small noble thing."

"Why, you're all grown up! The last time I saw you I was trying to throw thumbtacks into your cradle!"

"People aren't either wicked or noble," the hook-handed man said. They're like chef's salad, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict."

"As the hook-handed man circled the brig, it was as if the Baudelaires were picking through a chef's salad consisting mostly of dreadful- and perhaps even poisonous- ingredients, trying desperately to find the one noble crouton that might save their sister..."

"Lemony Snicket: (narrating) When you are invited to dine, particularly with people you do not know very well, it always helps to have a conversational opener, a phrase which here means "an interesting sentence to say out loud in order to get people talking." Although lately, it has become more and more difficult to attend dinner parties without the evening ending in gunfire or tapioca, I keep a list of good and bad conversational openers in my commonplace book in order to avoid awkward pauses at the dinner table. "Who would like to see an assortment of photographs taken while I was on vacation?" for instance, is a very poor conversational opener because it is likely to make your fellow diners shudder instead of talk, whereas good conversational openers are sentences such as "What would drive a man to commit arson?," "Why do so many stories of true love end in tragedy and despair?," and "Madam DeLustrio, I believe I've discovered your true identity!" all of which are likely to provoke discussions, arguments, and accusations, thus making the dinner party much more entertaining."

"Lemony Snicket: (narrating) Reading poetry, even if you are only reading to find a secret message within its words, can often give one a feeling of power, the way you can feel powerful if you are the only one who brought an umbrella on a rainy day or the only one who knows how to untie knots when you're taken hostage."

"I'm happier than a pig eating bacon!" Count Olaf cried. "I'm tickled pinker than a sun-burned Caucasian! I'm in higher spirits than a brand-new graveyard! I'm so happy-go-lucky that lucky and happy people are going to beat me with sticks out of pure, unbridled jealousy!"

"There is evil out there you cannot even imagine. -Captain Widdershins"

"C is for Cute A is for Adorable R is for Ravishing M is for Gorgeous E is for Excellent L is for Lovable I is for I'm the best! T is for Talented A is for "A tap-dancing ballerina fairy princess veterinarian! NOW LET'S START MY WHOLE WONDERFUL SONG ALL OVER AGAIN!"

"Carmelita Spats, who oughtta be told "Gorgeous" does not start with an M."

"I can't stand the lyrics."

"For Beatrice— No one could extinguish my love, or your house."

"Richard Wright, an American novelist of the realist school, asks a famous unfathomable question in his best-known novel, Native Son. Who knows when some slight shock, he asks, disturbing the delicate balance between social order and thirsty aspiration, shall send the skyscrapers in our cities toppling?"

"Lemony Snicket: (narrating) But the three siblings were not born yesterday. Violet was born more than fifteen years before this particular Wednesday, and Klaus was born approximately two years after that, and even Sunny, who had just passed out of babyhood, was not born yesterday. Neither were you, unless of course I am wrong, in which case welcome to the world, little baby, and congratulations on learning to read so early in life."

"The name John Godfrey Saxe is not likely to mean anything to you, unless you are a fan of American humorist poets of the nineteenth century. There are not many such people in the world, but the Baudelaires' father was one of them, and had several poems committed to memory. From time to time he would get into a whimsical mood-the word "whimsical," as you probably know, means "odd and impulsive"-and would grab the nearest Baudelaire child, bounce him or her up and down on his lap, and recite a poem by John Godfrey Saxe about an elephant. In the poem, six blind men encountered an elephant for the first time and were unable to agree on what the animal was like. The first man felt the tall, smooth side of the elephant, and concluded that an elephant was like a wall. The second man felt the tusk of the elephant, and decided that an elephant resembled a spear. The third man felt the trunk of the elephant, and the fourth felt one of the elephant's legs, and so on and so on, with all of the blind men bickering over what an elephant is like. As with many children, Violet and Klaus had grown old enough to find their father's whimsical moods a little embarrassing, so Sunny had become the primary audience for Mr. Baudelaire's poetry recital, and remembered the poem best."

"Burn down hotel! Sunny said."

"Never mind what you were doing, Olaf said. You're fired! You can't fire me! Esme growled. I quit! Well, you can leave by mutual agreement, Olaf grumbled and then with another succinct Ha! he lifted the harpoon gun and pointed it at Dewey Denouement."

"I'll have ten grams of rice, Mrs. Bass interrupted, one tenth of a hectogram of shrimp vindaloo, a dekagram of chana aloo masala, one thousand centigrams of tandori salmon, four samosas with surface area of nineteen cubic centimeters, five deciliters of mango lassi, and a sada rava dosai that's exactly nineteen centimeters long."

"The last safe place is safe no more."

"For Beatrice — I cherished, you perished, The world's been nightmarished"

"If you have read this far in the chronicle of the Baudelaire orphans—and I certainly hope you have not—then you know we have reached the thirteenth chapter of the thirteenth volume in this sad history, and so you know the end is near, even though this chapter is so lengthy that you might never reach the end of it. But perhaps you do not yet know what the end really means. "The end" is a phrase which refers to the completion of a story, or the final moment of some accomplishment, such as a secret errand, or a great deal of research, and indeed this thirteenth volume marks the completion of my investigation into the Baudelaire case, which required much research, a great many secret errands, and the accomplishments of a number of my comrades, from a trolley driver to a botanical hybridization expert, with many, many typewriter repair people in between. But it cannot be said that The End contains the end of the Baudelaires' story, any more than The Bad Beginning contained its beginning. The children's story began long before that terrible day on Briny Beach, but there would have to be another volume to chronicle when the Baudelaires were born, and when their parents married, and who was playing the violin in the candlelit restaurant when the Baudelaire parents first laid eyes on one another, and what was hidden inside that violin, and the childhood of the man who orphaned the girl who put it there, and even then it could not be said that the Baudelaires' story had not begun, because you would still need to know about a certain tea party held in a penthouse suite, and the baker who made the scones served at the tea party, and the baker's assistant who smuggled the secret ingredient into the scone batter through a very narrow drainpipe, and how a crafty volunteer created the illusion of a fire in the kitchen simply by wearing a certain dress and jumping around, and even then the beginning of the story would be as far away as the shipwreck that left the Baudelaire parents as castaways on the coastal shelf is far away from the outrigger on which the islanders would depart. One could say, in fact, that no story really has a beginning, and that no story really has an end, as all of the world's stories are as jumbled as the items in the arboretum, with their details and secrets all heaped together so that the whole story, from beginning to end, depends on how you look at it. We might even say that the world is always in medias res— a Latin phrase which means "in the midst of things" or "in the middle of a narrative"—and that it is impossible to solve any mystery, or find the root of any trouble, and so The End is really the middle of the story, as many people in this history will live long past the close of Chapter Thirteen, or even the beginning of the story, as a new child arrives in the world at the chapter's close. But one cannot sit in the midst of things forever. Eventually one must face that the end is near, and the end of The End is quite near indeed, so if I were you I would not read the end of The End, as it contains the end of a notorious villain but also the end of a brave and noble sibling, and the end of the colonists' stay on the island, as they sail off the end of the coastal shelf. The end of The End contains all these ends, and that does not depend on how you look at it, so it might be best for you to stop looking at The End before the end of The End arrives, and to stop reading The End before you read the end, as the stories that end in The End that began in The Bad Beginning are beginning to end now."

"I will love you no matter how many mistakes I make when trying to reduce fractions, and no matter how difficult it is to memorize the periodic table."

"I will love you as the manatee loves the head of lettuce and as the dark spot loves the leopard, as the leech loves the ankle of a wader and as a corpse loves the beak of the vulture."

"I will love you as the iceberg loves the ship, and the passengers love the lifeboat and the lifeboat loves the teeth of the sperm whale, and the sperm whale loves the flavor of naval uniforms."

"I never want to be away from you again, except at work, in the restroom or when one of us is at a movie the other does not want to see."

"Love was in the air so both of us walked through love on our way to the corner."

"The world gets grimy and the love object is in stark relief from its surroundings. This is love, a pretty thing on an ugly street and why wouldn't you pick it up if it appeared in a taxi cab."

"I'm frightened by your behaviour. I woke up this morning and you said good morning and i said good morning, what do you feel like doing today, and you said well i sort of have to do this thing, and i said what thing and you said go to the reading of my father's will, and I said what are you talking about and then you told me that your dad had died. THIS MORNING."

"If i were a little braver i would have asked her something like, "Do you think Kickass: the movie is a comedy in the traditional, classical sense?" and we could have that conversation and it would lead to other conversations during the flat and lonely times."

"Standing ten feet away from Lila was sort of kickass with her nails drumming on the box with the slot in, where we put everything that we rip in half, and with her blue-eyed beauty and with the gum she was chewing and how lovely she was, in that way that makes you want to find something else lovely just so you can give it to her and see how really kickass it is to have to lovely things next to each other."

"Keith has one of those all terrain things that will come in so handy when the world ends and we need a nine-thousand -cylinder engine to drive over those hordes of blood-thirsty mutants crawling all over the video-game landscape."

"This world is suchier than we are, and the best thing to do is keep moving and find your keys."

"Money money money money money money money money money. Let no one say it has no place in a love story. It has a particular place. It is something on the right shelf."

"This is love, moving to where the money is, and all the while a volcano or an ex-girlfriend might blow the whole thing to hell, as the Americans say. As everybody says."

"… the point is, why is there cruelty? Why do people ask other people to do impossible things? why behave this way? why is there mean, when there are better things than mean, love particularly?"

""I love you, too" David said and took the bottle. "I want you to love me in particular," Helena said"

"It's always dawnest before dark"

"I'm full of hard times today"

"The right boys I always toss and the wrong ones I keep on top of me like paperweights."

"What a bad day it was, the clouds were low and cloudy, the rain no fun, and the dark as it hit the late afternoon thick like someone who stops by your place and just won't leave. The day was canceled, almost, on account of the rain spilling itself over everything."

"This was that day if you know what I mean."

"It was a bad day for love."

"The rain, the rain, the rain. You can't even hear it outside the window but still it's a sad thing. Rain, the grade school teachers say, makes the trees and flowers grow, but we're not trees and flower, and so many grade school teachers are single."

"She said, "We're detectives" in the tone of voice that someone might say, "Making you happy isn't making me happy""

"They could not love anymore, they thought, just drink and pour coffee and track people down in the rain. They were living frigidly, as if in a cone of frost."

"All love gets over, and we must get over it."

"Love can smack you like a seagull, and pour all over your feet like junkmail. You can't be ready for such a thing any more than salt water taffy gets you ready for the ocean."

"Mike could see the fellow cooked and ate and sat on a sofa and put his feet up on the table it magazines. Mike didn't care which ones the fellow subscribed to, because Mike had subscribed to the fellow."

"This is love, and the trouble with it: it can make you embarrassed. Love is really liking someone a whole lot and not wanting to screw that up. Everybody's chewed over this. This unites us, this part of love."

"I find you interesting, Joe, so nearly everything you say will be interesting too. I love you. I could say I'm lonely but that's not the only reason."

"I'm not - the terrific guy you keep telling me about. I'm not made of sugar and spice and everything nice. I'm made of rats and snails and puppy-dogs tails. I lie sometimes. I have broken people's hearts. I'm looking for love, I'll admit that, but now that it's here in abundance, I'm afraid of commitment and I want you, please, to leave me."

"[she] gave me a puzzled frown like she thought offhand i was dead but the media's so unreliable these days."

"That's always where the love goes, with somebody else away from me."

"All four of them have completely abandoned one another."

"Adam hates Tomas and tried to get Eddie to join him in hate. It hasn't worked, although Eddie will admit certain shortcomings, and the two men have not met until now, in the forest, when Adam has decided that Tomas in Eddie's stories and the Tomas in this story are the same man."

"It was the sort of day when people walk in the park and solve problems. "We'll simply call the taxi company, David, and request a large one, like one of those vans." Is the sort of thing you would overhear if you were overhearing in the park."

"Dear Joe The letter said The windows rattle without you, you bastard. The trees are the cause, rattling in the wind, you jerk, the wild scraping those leaves and twigs against my window. They'll keep on doing this, you terrible husband, and slowly wear away our entire apartment."

"Yeah, I have a question," said the guy with the wicked eyes... "My question is, I quit. I'm going to quit."

"What he'd just said was "Who cares?" and nobody wants to hear that."

"South San Francisco The Industrial City is ugly as sin but somebody lives there: Allison, in fact."

"He's been misled and he's been afraid. He's been hit in the head and left for dead. He's been abused and he's been accused and he's been refused a piece of bread. On and on he goes down this road getting pushed around and lost and around and given until sundown to get out of town, and yet this is basically a love song. He's had the shit kicked out of him, and guess what? It's love."

"When I was crazy." the radio explained, "I thought you were great."

"Allison squinted at the strange, catastrophic sky, and took another step, another step, another step, because in the future - she could see it - this would not be happening."

"If you follow the diamond in my mother's ring from Africa to Germany to California to Arizona to Wisconsin, in the heel of a grandmother, in the beak of a magpie, in the gravel of the path, in someone else's novel, in the center of the earth where the volcanoes are from, you would forget the miracle, the reason diamonds end up in people's fingers in the first place. it is not the diamonds or the birds, the people or the potatoes, it is not any of the nouns. The miracle is the adverbs, the way things are done. It is the way love gets done despite every catastrophe."

""I know" Helena said and this is another example of why behave this way? Things just poured out of her mouth lately, like vomit, and sometimes it actually was."

"They are all one, the mothers of us all, like the money you spent. Imagine the vanish of weight if the advice of your mother never existed. They tell us things, unless we have no mothers and either way things turn out such that nothing you've ever heard is ever any help."

""Instead of change, please give me gun so i can shoot you." She is soft-spoken but short and full of rage lately, like her whole life."

"He bought a bird in its own cage, with a sheet over it so no one could see the bird and the bird couldn't see anyone, and the whole thing was a secret bird... Everything he said was tinged with the unreadability of someone who would bring a bird on cruise ship."

""Oh my god!" Hillary is standing in the doorway of the bathroom of the bathroom which on one had is surprising but there's the other hand, too."

""Help me," Allison says, but she is soft-spoken, and everyone she loves is so far away."

"Over the years they had developed a layer of sincerity over the irony over the sincerity. It was an irony sandwich, then, which tasted mostly like sincerity, like a cheap, bad sandwich."

"Wedding after wedding after wedding and then yours - your wedding? Would that make you what they're now calling happy?"

"God, or somebody, what is it with terrible things? If you made this world why not a better one?"

"judgmentally, judgmentally, judgmentally I would believe in you and sword fight others who did not, any necessary sacrifice if you were in the mood for that."

"They say love's like a bus, and if you wait long enough another one will come along, but not in this place where the buses are slow and most of the cute ones are gay."

"If you have ever peeled an onion, then you know that the first thin, papery layer reveals another thin, papery layer, and that layer reveals another, and another, and before you know it you have hundreds of layers all over the kitchen table and thousands of tears in your eyes, sorry that you ever started peeling in the first place and wishing that you had left the onion alone to wither away on the shelf of the pantry while you went on with your life, even if that meant never again enjoying the complicated and overwhelming taste of this strange and bitter vegetable. In this way, the story of the Baudelaire orphans is like an onion, and if you insist on reading each and every thin, papery layer in A Series of Unfortunate Events, your only reward will be 170 chapters of misery in your library and countless tears in your eyes. Even if you have read the first twelve volumes of the Baudelaires' story, it is not too late to stop peeling away the layers, and to put this book back on the shelf to wither away while you read something less complicated and overwhelming. The end of this unhappy chronicle is like its bad beginning, as each misfortune only reveals another, and another, and another, and only those with the stomach for this strange and bitter tale should venture any farther into the Baudelaire onion. I'm sorry to tell you this, but that is how the story goes."

"Olaf: Of course I'm trying to trick you! That's the way of the world, Baudelaires. Everyone runs around with their secrets and their schemes, trying to outwit everyone else. Ishmael outwitted me, and put me in this cage. But I know how to outwit him and all his islander friends. If you let me out, I can be king of Olaf-Land, and you three can be my new henchfolk."

"Friday: Baudelaires, please come with me. Olaf: What about me? Friday: Go away."

"Of course, it is quite possible to be in the dark in the dark, but there are so many secrets in the world that it is likely that you are always in the dark about one thing or another, whether you are in the dark in the dark or in the dark not in the dark, although the sun can go down so quickly that you may be in the in the dark about being in the dark, only to look around and find yourself no longer in the dark about being in the dark, but in the dark in the dark nontheless, not only because of the dark, but because of the ballerinas in the dark, who are not in the dark about the dark, but also not in the dark about the locked cabinet, and you may be in the dark about the ballerinas digging up the locked cabinet in the dark, even though you are no longer in the dark about being in the dark, and so you are in fact in the dark about being in the dark, even though you are not in the dark about being in the dark, and so you may fall into the hole that the ballerinas have dug, which is dark, in the dark, and in the park."

"Perhaps if we saw what was ahead of us, and glimpsed the crimes, follies, and misfortunes that would befall us later on, we would all stay in our mother's wombs, and there would be nobody in the world but a great number of very fat, very irritated women."

"Olaf: I'm a genius! I've solved all of our problems! Look! Violet: Renaming the boat doesn't solve any of our problems."

"Halloween seems to last forever, until it is finally time to put on one's costume and demand candy from strangers."

"Yes, maybe it's time to move on. Spare some our hurt before the World retakes what we always elude when we run."

"Because we're ever happening, coaxing a World free from US to have fun. Destroy. We're all anyone must absolutely have to enjoy."

"Because we're every happy trail, enjoining a World free of US to have fun. Enjoy. We're all anyone must absatively fails to destroy."

"Because I feer the irreparable loss of holding someone dear."

"Give US Torment, Deaths and Futures. Then curl up with you through Reunions, Abuses and Departures. Too when you arrive. When you're alone. When I go. When I'm alone. But always beside you whenever we roam"

"Does anyone ever allow US? Only our yearning out racing. These Worlds of ours. United if Unforgiven."

"How is forever? Taking everyone."

"Only there is no exile anymore. There's only US."

"On we rush. Appeal's death. If it were the end all the time, it would allways be just. We are never just."

"Love kid. Lost until you give it some kick. You're too young to leave it. Too young to keep it. Love's the breath a Life still lifts when Life is finally over with."

"There was such a dense concentration of energy there [Vietnam], American and essentially adolescent, if that energy could have been channeled into anything more than noise, waste and pain it would have lighted up Indochina for a thousand years."

"I think that Vietnam is what we had instead of happy childhoods."

"War stories aren't really anything more than stories about people anyway."

"Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam, we've all been there."

"Soldier: You guys aught to do a story on me suntahm. Herr: Why should we do a story about you? Soldier: 'Cause I'm so fuckin' good, 'n' that ain' no shit, neither. Got me one hunnert 'n' fifty-se'en gooks kilt. 'N' fifty caribou. Them're all certified."

"Mal Hombre: God damn it, Sergeant. I thought you were a professional soldier. Sergeant: I waited as long as I could, Sir. Any longer, and I was gonna lose my man. Mal Hombre: This outfit is perfectly capable of taking care of its own dirty laundry. Is that clear, Sergeant? Sergeant: Colonel, since when is a wounded trooper 'dirty laundry'?"

"Black sergeant: You a reporter? Herr: No, a writer. Black sergeant: Careful. You can't use no eraser up where you wanna go."

"3:AM: To bring the conversation back down to earth, one thing I know, which is neither paradoxical nor contradictory, is your love of football and your team PAOK. Perhaps such simple pleasures can be considered a gentler form of hope?"

"Say you are invited to dinner, you arrive and the table is set. A succulent piece of steak is served, a little blood oozes out of the tender meat. Has that piece become so alien to its “history” that you would never wonder about its past? If you did, how far back would you go? Certainly as far as the kitchen, that is easy to do, but how about what happened before? The slaughterhouse or, possibly, the gruesome life of the animal? There’s a story behind the little blood that you see, a residue hinting at the end of a life. A trace that has come to reach you, and you might want to follow the thread and think about life as part of a system—the prearranged context surrounding the chair you have sat on and the clean dish in which your dinner was served."

"Since I started with an anecdote, let me continue with one more: There is a Roma friend of mine, Babis, whom I randomly meet around my neighbourhood when I am in Greece. I have him in a passage in Z213: EXIT, so, when I see him around I say that I owe him royalties and invite him for a drink. Last time I saw him he stayed with us in a tavern up to the early hours of the morning, at which point I offered to give him a lift. When, a few minutes later, he got out of the car on a dark nondescript street, he made an on the spot decision about where to go and what to do next. As I now recall his solitary figure in this dark street while driving away, I come to think of Keats’s “burden of the Mystery”. After we get out of the non-thinking room in the huge mansion of life, we reach the splendidly colourful maiden-room of thought which entices us with the discoveries we make there, before we see it darken from the discovery of pain and suffering; and, as we realise that, we see the doors around us opening to dark corridors leading to the unknown. Who dares follow them when nothing is given, abandon planning ahead and open up to whatever may come? We carry with us a backpack of ideas, theories, insecurities and the detailed scenarios we project onto the future. Unlike us, outcasts, fugitives and people in the margins are the ones possessing the negative capability, the power to bear the “burden of the mystery”; immigrants cross seas that might engulf them. Their fear is overcome not only by the hope of a better life but also by their acceptance of those darker alleys, where time and space are created at the moment in which they are experienced. Z213: EXIT is the journey of such a man, whom I don’t know if it is right to call a “character” – in order to call him that, one should know more than what is found in the book and, perhaps, more than I know about him myself. ."

"This is continuity, you travel, perhaps in your mind, a paper world real, God reeling up and down landscapes and buildings, knocks down, opens new roads, doesn’t like it, changes again, but there isn’t a seam, His world is onefold, and you perceive neither seam nor contradiction, continuity only."

"[...] your own are burning and your memories and you don't want to leave them. Everything will burn to the end, you suffer, but nobody is punishing you, they are just setting your soul free. Don't be afraid because while you fear death they will rend your soul like demons. Only calm down and you will see the angels who are setting you free and then you will be free."

"And when you can no longer remember, just meaningless things here and there and you can't. But still try even then, as the twilight sets in, stand and look at the past, walk again along the corridors where your eyes used to wander, attentive ghosts, open the boxes, think of the other side of the wall. Sit at the side of the road and see yourself pass. See the web, see how the passages of the maze all lead again to the same point which does not exactly coincide with the exit."

"[...] a course laid between the seed and the snare"

"Никаких философских проблем нет, есть только анфилада лингвистических тупиков, вызванных неспособностью языка отразить Истину."

"In Russia, history is something that, you know, used to be rewritten every five years. It's written once again, and it's just a game."

"Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorized in a new production..."

"Science has always been in conflict with narratives. Judged by the yardstick of science, the majority of them prove to be fables. But to the extent that science does not restrict itself to stating useful regularities and seeks truth, it is obliged to legitimate the rules of its own game."

"I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives."

"The logic of maximum performance is no doubt inconsistent in many ways, particularly with respect to contradiction in the socio-economic field: it demands both less work (to lower production costs) and more (to lessen the social burden of the idle population). But our incredulity is now such that we no longer expect salvation to rise from these inconsistencies, as did Marx."

"Here is the question: is a legitimization of the social bond, a just society, feasible in terms of a paradox analogous to that of scientific activity? What would such a paradox be?"

"…Scientific knowledge does not represent the totality of knowledge; it has always existed in addition to, and in competition and conflict with, another kind of knowledge, which I will call narratives in the interest of simplicity."

"Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorized in a new product."

"The moment knowledge ceases to be an end in itself—its realization of The Idea or the emancipation of men—it’s transmission is no longer the exclusive responsibility of scholars and students."

"It is generally accepted that nature is an indifferent, not deceptive opponent, and it is upon this basis that the distinction is made between the natural and the human sciences."

"True knowledge, in this perspective, is always indirect knowledge; it is composed of reported statements, that are incorporated into metanarratives of a subject that source their legitimacy."

"Let us wage war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable, let us activate the different and save the honor of the name."

"Our working hypothesis is that the status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter the postmodern age."

"The relationship of the suppliers and users of knowledge to the knowledge they supply and use is now tending, and will be increasingly tend to, to assume the form already taken by the relationship of commodity producers and consumers to the commodities they produce and consume--that is, the form of knowledge."

"Knowledge in the form of an informational commodity indispensable to productive power is already, and will continue to be, a major-perhaps the major- stake in the world wide. It is conceivable the nation state will one day fight for control of information, just as they battled over territory, and afterwards for control of access to and exploitation of raw materials and cheap labor. A new field opened for industrial and commercial strategies on the one hand, and political and military strategies."

"For the mercantilization of knowledge is bound to affect the privilege the nation-states have enjoyed, and still enjoy, with respect to the production and distribution of learning. The notion that learning falls within the purview of the State, as the brain or mind of society, will become more and more outdated with increasing strength of the opposing principle."

"Already in the last few decades, economic powers have reached the point of imperiling the stability of the state through new forms of the circulation of capital that go by the generic name of multinational corporations."

"Legitimation is the process by which a legislator is authorized to promulgate such a law as a norm."

"What is new in all this is that the old poles of attraction represented by nation-states, parties, professions, institutions, and historical traditions are losing their attraction. And it does not look as though they will be replaced, at least not on their former scale."

"The grand narrative has lost its credibility, regardless of what mode of unification is uses, regardless of whether it is a speculative narrative or a narrative of emancipation."

"The decline of narrative can be seen as an effect of the blossoming of techniques and technologies since the Second World War, Which has shifted emphasis from the ends of action to this means; it can also be seen as an effect of the redeployment of advanced liberal capitalism after its retreat under the protection of Keynesianism during the period of 1930-1960, a renewal that has eliminated the communist alternative and valorized the individual enjoyment of goods and services."

"While we talk, the sun is getting older. It will explode in 4.5 billion years. … In comparison everything else seems insignificant. Wars, conflicts, political tension, shifts in opinion, philosophical debates, even passions—everything’s dead already if this infinite reserve from which you now draw energy to defer answers, if in short thought as a quest, dies out with the sun. … The inevitable explosion to come, the one that’s always forgotten in your intellectual ploys, can be seen in a certain way as coming before the fact to render these ploys … futile. … In 4.5 billions years there will arrive the demise of your phenomenology and your utopian politics, and there’ll be no one there to toll the death knell or hear it. It will be too late to understand that your passionate, endless questioning always depended on a “life of the mind.” … Thought borrows a horizon and orientation, the limitless limit and the end without end it assumes, from the corporeal, sensory, emotional and cognitive experience of a quite sophisticated but definitely earthly existence. With the disappearance of the earth, thought will have stopped—leaving that disappearance absolutely unthought of. … The death of the sun is a death of mind. … There’s no sublation or deferral if nothing survives. … The sun, our earth, and your thought will have been no more than a spasmodic state of energy, an instant of established order, a smile on the surface of matter in a remote corner of the cosmos. … Human death is included in the life of the mind. Solar death implies an irreparably exclusive disjunction between death and thought: if there’s death, then there’s no thought."

"Matter asks no questions, expects no answers of us. It ignores us. It made us the way it makes all bodies—by chance and according to its laws."

"The body might be considered the hardware of the complex technical device that is human thought."

"Philosophy is possible only because the material ensemble called “man” is endowed with very sophisticated software. But also, this software, human language, is dependent on the condition of the hardware. Now: the hardware will be consumed in the solar explosion, taking philosophical thought with it (along with all other thought) as it goes up in flames. So the problem of the technological sciences can be stated as follows: how can we provide this software with a hardware that is independent of the conditions of life on earth? That is: how can we make thought without a body possible?"

"In the discussion we had last year at Siegen, in this regard, emphasis was put on the sort of emptiness that has to be obtained from mind and body by a Japanese warrior-artist when doing calligraphy, by an actor when acting: the kind of suspension of ordinary intentions of mind associated with habitus, or arrangements of the body. It’s at this cost, said Glenn and Andreas, … that a brush encounters the “right” shapes, that a voice and a theatrical gesture are endowed with the “right” tone and look. The soliciting of emptiness, this evacuation—very much the opposite of overweening, selective identificatory activity—doesn’t take place without some suffering. … The body and mind have to be free of burdens for grace to touch us."

"There’s a necessity for physical experience and a recourse to exemplary cases of bodily ascesis to understand and make understood a type of emptying of the mind, an emptying that is required if the mind is to think. This obviously has nothing to do with tabula rasa, with what Descartes (vainly) wanted to be a starting from scratch on the part of knowing thought."

"...The sublime feeling is not mere pleasure as taste is – it is a mixture of pleasure and pain... Confronted with objects that are too big according to their magnitude or too violent according to their power, the mind experiences its own limitations."

"So if Nussbaum’s neglect of global capitalism poses a problem for her project, so too does her blanket dismissal of postmodernism. Though I get impatient with Jean-François Lyotard and with all who cite him as a bringer of Higher Truths, I fi nd him impossible to dismiss completely — if one is going to be a responsible citizen of the world. For Lyotard surveys the world’s different ways of thinking and believes that to bring them to “consensus” — or even to try to get them communicating reciprocally — is to do irreparable harm to the integrity of others. More than this: for Lyotard, the effort to negotiate the heterogeneity of language games amounts to a kind of terror. This view is badly mistaken, I think. Try to imagine that our world is beset by too much communicative rationality, desperately in need of more monads and monologists, and you’ll see what I mean. And yet Lyotard’s idea of the “differend,” or the nonnegotiable difference, strikes me as absolutely essential to an understanding of education and cultural conflict. If you pursue Lyotard too far, of course, you wind up unable to criticize other cultures’ practices of female circumcision or widow burning, but if you don’t pursue Lyotard at all, you risk succumbing to the fantasy that all disputes between “reason” and “unreason,” or between different varieties of reasoning, can be mediated by a double dose of reason."

"I would never save her. I looked at the woman mopping up the tea, and it came to me that I could not save her either. Enola or the cat or any of them, lost here in the endless stairways and cul-de-sacs of time. They were already dead a hundred years, past saving. The past is beyond saving. Surely that was the lesson the history department sent me all this way to learn. Well, fine, I’ve learned it. Can I go home now?"

"A cage is a safe place as long as nobody has the key."

"He sorted all the mail into three piles of “for” and “against” and “wildly insane,” then threw all of them into the wastebasket."

"Do you suppose Walter Hunt would have invented the safety pin if he had known that punk rockers would stick them through their cheeks?"

"“Fifty-nine,” Mr. Mowen said. “That’s too many coincidences to just be a coincidence.”"

"“Do you like Denver?” “Sure,” I said. I found the pocket-sized recorder and laid it on the table. “Smog, oil refineries, traffic. What’s not to like?”"

"“I’m a scientist, not a psychiatrist. I don’t believe dreams have a ‘real’ meaning. They’re a physical process, and any ‘reality’ they have lies in the physical. Freud made no attempt to understand the physical. He felt the key to understanding dream lay in content, and came up with an elaborate system of symbols to explain the images in dreams.”"

"“In my opinion, dream interpretation as practiced by most Freudian psychiatrists, including some of mine at the Institute, is nothing more than a fancy system of guessing. I think trying to understand the ‘real’ meaning of a dream without reference to the physical state of the dreamer is as pointless as trying to understand what a fever ‘means’ without studying the body.”"

"One of the greatest difficulties I encounter in my research is that people want to believe that their dreams mean something, but all the research I’m doing seems to indicate just the opposite."

"“Why is it,” Joss said, “that whenever I find you, you are always about to hop in bed with my employer?”"

"“They’re absolutely necrotic, aren’t they?” Colin whispered behind his order of service. “It’s late twentieth century atonal,” Dunworthy whispered back. “It’s supposed to sound dreadful.”"

"It’s the light, she thought. Everyone looks like a cutthroat by torchlight. No wonder they invented electricity."

"Everyone else had the look of tired patience people always got when listening to a sermon, no matter what the century."

"“The clerk is dying, Rosemund is dying, you’ve all been exposed. Why shouldn’t I give up hope?” “God has not abandoned us utterly,” he said. “Agnes is safe in his arms.” Safe, she thought bitterly. In the ground. In the cold. In the dark."

"Nobody deserves this. “Please,” she prayed, and wasn’t sure what she asked. Whatever it was, it was not granted."

"It doesn’t matter, she thought, and realized in spite of everything, horror after horror, Roche still believed in God. He had been going to the church to say matins when he found the steward, and if they all died, he would go on saying them and not find anything incongruous in his prayers."

"Kepe from haire. Der fevreblau hast bifallen us."

"In my log, there's nothing worse than working for a government with the guilts. All we were doing on Boohte was surveying the planet, but Big Brother didn't want anybody accusing them of “ruthless imperialist expansion” and riding roughshod over the indidges the way they did when they colonized America. So they set up all these rules to “preserve planetary ecosystems” (which was supposed to mean we weren't allowed to build dams or kill the local fauna) and “protect indigenous cultures from technological contamination” (which was supposed to mean we couldn't give ’em firewater and guns), and stiff fines for breaking the rules. Which is where they made their first mistake, because they paid the fines to the indidges, and Bult and his tribe knew a good thing when they saw it, and before you know it we’re being fined for making footprints, and Bult’s buying technological contamination right and left with the proceeds."

"Ah, Hollywood, where everybody wants to be in the movies and nobody’s ever bothered to watch one."

"I’ve never understood why the faces, who have nothing to sell but an original personality, an original face, all try to look like somebody else. But I guess it makes sense. Why should they be different from everybody else in Hollywood, which has always been in love with sequels and imitations and remakes?"

"And why take a chance on a new movie when they can do a sequel or a copy or a remake of something they already own? And while we are at it, why not star remakes in the remake? Hollywood, the ultimate recycler!"

"We came out on Hollywood Boulevard, on the corner of Chaos and Sensory Overload, the worst possible place to flash."

"“Contrary to popular belief, the computer graphics revolution didn’t kill the musical,” the prof said. “The musical kicked off,” he paused to let the class titter, “in 1965.… “The musicals, with their contrived storylines, unrealistic song-and-dance sequences, and simplistic happy endings, no longer reflected the audience’s world.”"

"“What’s going on?” I whispered to Gina. “Management is proving beyond a shadow of a doubt they don’t have enough to do,” she murmured back. “So they’ve invented a new acronym.”"

"Therein lay the secret to all fads: the herd instinct. People wanted to look like everybody else. That was why they bought white bucks and pedal pushers and bikinis. But someone had to be the first one to wear platform shoes, to bob their hair, and that took the opposite of herd instinct."

"There are moments when rather than reforming the human race I’d like to abandon it altogether and go become, say, one of Dr. O’Reilly’s macaques, which have to have more sense."

"Barbie’s one of those fads whose popularity makes you lose all faith in the human race."

"Why do only the awful things become fads? I thought. Eye-rolling and Barbie and bread pudding. Why never chocolate cheesecake or thinking for yourself?"

"“My physics teacher used to say Diogenes shouldn’t have wasted his time looking for an honest man,” Shirl said, “he should have been looking for somebody who thought for himself.”"

"Management cares about only one thing. Paperwork. They will forgive almost anything else—cost overruns, gross incompetence, criminal indictments—as long as the paperwork’s filled out properly. And in on time."

"Management’ll never go for it. First, it’s live-animal research, which is controversial. Management hates controversy. Second, it’s something innovative, which means Management will hate it on principle."

"You shouldn’t be looking for the secret to making people follow fads, you should be looking for the secret to making them think for themselves. Because that’s what science is all about."

"“That makes no sense,” I said. “This is the Victorian era,” she said. “Women didn’t have to make sense.”"

"“Servants don’t travel with their employers.” “How do they do without them?” ”They don’t.”"

"It is a temporal universal that people never appreciate their own time, especially transportation. Twentieth-Century contemps complained about cancelled flights and gasoline prices, Eighteenth-Century contemps complained about muddy roads and highwaymen. No doubt Professor Peddick’s Greeks complained about recalcitrant horses and chariot wheels falling off."

"“Baine, what do you think of this?” Tossie said, indicating the bishop’s bird stump. “Don’t you agree it’s the most beautiful piece of art you’ve ever seen?” Baine straightened and looked at it, blinking water out of his eyes. There was a considerable pause while Baine wrung out his sleeve. “No.” “No?” Tossie said, making it into a screamlet. “No.”... “What do you mean, ‘no’?” “I mean the sculpture is a hideous atrocity, vulgarly conceived, badly designed, and shoddily executed,” he said, folding the shawl carefully and bending to lay it back in the bundle. “How dare you say that,” Tossie said, her cheeks very pink. Baine straightened. “I beg you pardon, miss. I thought you were asking my opinion.” “I was, but I expected you to tell me you thought it was beautiful.” He bowed slightly. “As you wish, miss.” He looked at it, his face impassive. “It is very beautiful.”"

"“How dare you contradict their opinions! You are only a common servant.” “Yes, miss,” he said wearily. “You should be dismissed for being insolent to your betters.” There was a long pause, and then Baine said, “All the diary entries and dismissals in the world cannot change the truth. Galileo recanted under threat of torture, but that did not make the sun revolve round the earth. If you dismiss me, the vase will still be vulgar, I will still be right, and your taste will still be plebeian, no matter what you write in your diary.” “Plebeian?” Tossie said, bright pink. “How dare you speak like that to your mistress? You are dismissed.” She pointed imperiously at the house. “Pack your things immediately.” “Yes, miss,” Baine said. “E pur si muove.” “What?” Tossie said, bright red with rage. “What did you say?” “I said, now that finally have dismissed me, I am no longer a member of the servant class and am therefore in a position to speak freely,” he said calmly. “You are not in a position to speak to me at all,” Tossie said, raising her diary like a weapon. “Leave at once.” “I dared to speak the truth to you because I felt you were deserving of it,” Baine said seriously. “I had only your best interests at heart, as I have always had. You have been blessed with great riches; not only with the riches of wealth, position, and beauty, but with a bright mind and a keen sensibility, as well as with a fine spirit. And yet you squander those riches on croquet and organdies and trumpery works of art. You have at your disposal a library of the great minds of the past, and yet you read the foolish novels of Charlotte Yonge and Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Given the opportunity to study science, you converse with conjurors wearing cheesecloth and phosphorescent paint. Confronted by the glories of Gothic architecture, you admire instead a cheap imitation of it, and confronted by the truth, you stamp your foot like a spoilt child and demand to be told fairy stories.”"

"The continuum had somehow managed to correct the incongruity, pairing off lovers like the last act of a Shakespearean comedy, though just how it had managed it wasn’t clear. What was clear was that it had wanted us out of the way while it was doing whatever it was doing. So it had done the time-travel equivalent of locking us in our rooms."

"If they were part of the self-correction (i. e., of the space-time continuum) what did that do to the notion of free will? Or was free will part of the plan as well?"

"One has to know how to swim just well enough to avoid having to save anyone else."

"Children of that age often fall downstairs, you did. Twice. You only worry if there's silence when they reach the bottom."

"For twelve months now, since I first began the practice of law, since I became an attorney, a man who speak for others, a counselor at law who has the power to address the court, that’s right, a big man, a mature person who helps others in distress—for approximately 365 days time has been nothing but a never-ending experience that meets me in the morning just like it left me off the night before. No longer am I the clear-headed mathematician of my college years. I used to have the answers; and if I didn’t, I could always turn to the back of the book or ask Professor Blackburn at Wednesday morning’s advanced algebra class. For a year now, my only conscious concern has been the pain in my stomach, the arguments of Dr. Serbin, and the schedules of the television shows. I know them all by heart. I can quote every single fucking show on Channels 2, 4, 5, 7, and, you won’t believe it, even on the educational station, Channel 9. I am the world’s only living T.V. Guide, that’s really what I am. And they want me to counsel them!"

"The truth of the matter is that death is a mystery to me. I have no opinion on the subject."

"Young, blond fags with powder-blue eyes and soft shoes skipped along arm-in-arm. Chinese girls with long hair and black stockings carried metal pots into Ernie’s Delicatessen for bean cake, barbequed duck, Chinese curds and steamed rice. Art students from the Art Institute, draftsmen from Heald’s College and law students from S.F. Law School walked by in carefree abandon, none of them in pain, all with beautiful girls in red slippers. They had leather, beads and books and pipes and scabs of hair on their interesting faces. Polk Street at night was always Christmas Eve for lonely men such as myself."

"I’m an innocent, brown-eyed child of the sun. Just a peach-picker’s boy from the West Side. Riverbank. My father’s a janitor with only a third-grade education and my mother makes tortillas at 5:00 A.M. before she goes to the cannery."

"I simply nod, for I have already noticed the short distance between his right and left eyes. It is my secret way of detecting fags. I know he will speak. And the first thing the idiot says is, “Are you by any chance Samoan?” All my life strangers have been interested in my ancestry. There is something about my bearing that cries out for history. I’ve been mistaken for American Indian, Spanish, Filipino, Hawaiian, Samoan and Arabian. No one has ever asked me if I’m a spic or a greaser. Am I Samoan? “Aren’t we all?” I groan."

"He reached his hand toward me. “You don’t mind my asking, do you?” “Of course not,” I say calmly as I reverse the lit end of the cigarette so that the flame is cupped in the palm. I reach for his handshake. He screams like a woman in distress with her skirt held high. I puff my meanness as he licks at the burn and whimpers, “You sonofagun. You’ve burned the dickens out of my hand.” “I know.” “But why? I didn’t do anything. I don’t even know you.” “I guess it’s my Samoan blood.” Sal rushes to my defense. He points his finger at the fag. “Out!” “But I didn’t do anything.” “Out, out!” he shouts, his hands stiffly on the bar. The old fag picks himself up and begins to drag himself out."

"Manuel Mercado Acosta is an indio from the mountains of Durango. His father operated a mescal distillery before the revolutionaries drove him out. He met my mother while riding a motorcycle in El Paso. Juana Fierro Acosta is my mother. She could have been a singer in a Juarez cantina but instead decided to be Manuel’s wife because he had a slick mustache, a fast bike and promised to take her out of the slums across from the Rio Grande. She had only one demand in return for the two sons and three daughters she would bear him: “No handouts. No relief. I never want to be on welfare.” I doubt he really promised her anything in a very loud, clear voice. My father was a horsetrader even though he got rid of both the mustache and the bike when FDR drafted him, a wetback, into the U.S. Navy on June 22, 1943. He tried to get into the Marines, but when they found out he was a good swimmer and a non-citizen they put him in a sailor suit and made him drive a barge in Okinawa. We lived in a two-room shack without a floor. We had to pump our water and use kerosene if we wanted to read at night. But we never went hungry. My old man always bought the pinto beans and the white flour for the tortillas in 100-pound sacks which my mother used to make dresses, sheets and curtains. We had two acres of land which we planted every year with corn, tomatoes and yellow chiles for the hot sauce. Even before my father woke us, my old ma was busy at work making the tortillas at 5:00 A.M. while he chopped the logs we’d hauled up from the river on the weekends."

"In fact the only times we could read funny books was when my father was in the Navy. Nothing would infuriate him more than to catch us browsing through Captain Marvel or Plastic Man. Men, after all, didn’t waste their time reading funny books. Men, he’d tell us, took life seriously. Nothing could be learned from books that were funny."

"When we left El Segundo Barrio across the street from the international border, we didn’t expect the Mexicans in California to act like gringos. But they did. We were outsiders because of geography and outcasts because we didn’t speak English and wore short pants. And so we had to fight every single day."

"We had to fight the Okies because we were Mexicans! It didn’t matter to them that my brother and I were outcasts on our own turf. They’d have laughed if we’d told them that we were easterners. To them we were greasers, spics and niggers. If you lived on the West Side, across from the tracks, and had brown skin, you were a Mexican. Riverbank is divided into three parts, and in my corner of the world there were only three kinds of people: Mexicans, Okies and Americans. Catholics, Holy Rollers and Protestants. Peach pickers, cannery workers and clerks."

"That same night I went into the chicken coop, took my hooked knife which I used to pit peaches with, and carved her initials on the back side of my left hand … JA. Jane Addison. My first true love. The original Miss It. I was in such a fog that I forgot to cover it with a glove or something. At supper, right in front of my mother, my brother Bob said in a loud voice, “What’s that on your hand?” I pretended not to hear. I quickly switched my fork to my right hand and put my left hand under the table. “Hey, mom. Oscar cut himself,” the bastard said. “What?” she cried out. She couldn’t stand violence unless it was part of some beating to teach me respect."

"Ever since I’d shown my bleeding arms to my sweetheart we hadn’t spoken a word. I’d simply decided to wait until she told me she appreciated carved tatoos. But she never did. She just ignored my obvious suffering. The pain in my gut, the secret gnawing at my belly didn’t concern her one damn bit. Things got so bad for me I finally took to smoking like all my buddies were already doing. I rolled up whole pages of old funny books and smoked the shit until my lungs ached. I’d cut vines from the ivy that crawled up the sides of the chicken coop and puff on my homemade cigars until my head buzzed."

"On the way home from school, I’d go two blocks out of my way to pass by Lopez’ Pool Hall to look for cigarette butts that the veteranos had flicked to the sidewalk. They had G.I. hair cuts, their old, spit-shined paratrooper boots and the same khaki uniforms they wore to fight the Japs. I’d pretend not to notice them leaning against the building. With my head down, I’d walk along the gutter and just casually push the longer butts with my toe as if I were kicking a can or a rock … just a barefoot boy with cheek humhumming along the road on a hot summer day in his Huckleberry Finn strides, oh yes!"

"I’d kick the butt, without missing a step or crushing it, all the way to the corner, turn to see if they were looking in my direction, then pick it up and run to the little park behind the Santa Fe Depot where I kept my penny box of matches hidden in an old squirrel’s nest. Then I’d light her up and suck up the hot, delicious smoke that made one a man and life barely tolerable."

"Even after my old man returned from the wars with all his ribbons and a thousand stories I still struggled for survival without my love. He was so busy rigging up the house to look like a ship, printing the rules of command on little notes which he pinned to the wall above the sink, Attention: Do not waste water … Do not throw garbage in here; in the outhouse and in the washroom, Attention: Toilet paper rules … Use only four sections per use … Do not throw funny paper in commode. I doubt if he noticed my dying condition."

"He introduced me to all the intellectuals at S.F. State and convinced me I should be a writer since I had so many fucking stories to tell. Little did he know I was scared shitless of all those guys with the tweed coats and fancy pipes."

"Since I was about ten years younger than this crew of alcoholics, I just listened and filled their cups with cheap wine. After they’d had enough, I’d tell them of my escapades in Riverbank and in Panama where I’d worked with the Southern Baptist Convention and Jesus Christ to save the black souls of niggers, spics and Indians. I used to keep my eye on Harris when I told my stories. He had this nasty habit of pulling out a little notebook in the middle of a conversation and jotting down, as he said, “story ideas.” Later on, after I’d transferred to S.F. State and taken his writing course, he asked me if I wanted to read his first draft of Wake Up, Stupid! I kept it for a week and returned it to him at the next short story seminar. I only read the first paragraph. After that, I was no longer afraid of the intellectuals. I knew I could tell a better story."

"Before it was over, I had built a mission in Chilibre, a small village with black Jamaicans and brown Panamanians, and one at the Palo Seco Leper Colony. They had been waiting for someone like me all their life. We built a church out of palm trees and mango leaves. We sang in Spanish and in English and occasionally I played my clarinet for them and warned them against civilization. I told them to stay out of Panama City, to lay off their home brew made from masticated corn and to quit smoking coco leaves. In return, I no longer went to movies, quit playing jazz and didn’t touch my penis except to piss for two whole years. They elected me to the Board of Deacons at the First Baptist Church in Balboa after I became so successful in the jungle. They even sent some of my color slides to the churches back home and told them that a “Mexican Billy Graham” was converting natives right and left. In exchange the Southern Baptists sent Pastor Beebee more money to make new additions to the church. It already looked like an old mansion on a southern plantation."

"But I was miserable. I hurt inside. I didn’t have the peace of mind that Jesus promised if we did his work. I didn’t have the very thing I preached. Finally, in January of 1956 when I had but six months to go on my tour of duty, I made up my mind to settle it once and for all. I made a final study of the Bible and wrote down everything that sounded true in a notebook on my right. Those things that sounded wrong or inconsistent or that I couldn’t believe, I wrote in a notebook to my left. For three months, between 3:00 and 7:00 A.M., sitting under a single bulb in the attic above the barracks, I made a comparative study of the Synoptic Gospels. When I finished, the left-handed notebook was completely filled with chapter and verse and reasons why I could not believe in Christianity. The right-handed notebook contained about two pages of homilies on love. So I gave up Jesus and the Baptist Church."

"I was twenty-one and without God. I had no one to love me and no one for me to love. Since there was no after-life, what then did it matter? I leaned forward, ready to lurch to my doom."

"When I have the one million Brown Buffalos on my side I will present the demands for a new nation to both the U.S. Government and the United Nations … and then I’ll split and write the book. I have no desire to be a politician. I don’t want to lead anyone. I have no practical ego. I am not ambitious. I merely want to do what is right. Once in every century there comes a man who is chosen to speak for his people. Moses, Mao and Martin are examples. Who’s to say that I am not such a man? In this day and age the man for all seasons needs many voices. Perhaps that is why the gods have sent me into Riverbank, Panama, San Francisco, Alpine and Juarez. Perhaps that is why I’ve been taught so many trades. Who will deny that I am unique? For months, for years, no, all my life I sought to find out who I am. Why do you think I became a Baptist? Why did I try to force myself into the Riverbank Swimming Pool? And did I become a lawyer just to prove to the publishers I could do something worthwhile? Any idiot that sees only the obvious is blind. For God sake, I have never seen and I have never felt inferior to any man or beast. My single mistake has been to seek an identity with any one person or nation or with any part of history.… What I see now, on this rainy day in January, 1968, what is clear to me after this sojourn is that I am neither a Mexican nor an American. I am neither a Catholic nor a Protestant. I am a Chicano by ancestry and a Brown Buffalo by choice."

"Oscar was not into serious street-fighting, but he was hell on wheels in a bar brawl. Any combination of a 250 lb Mexican and LSD-25 is a potentially terminal menace for anything it can reach – but when the alleged Mexican is in fact a profoundly angry Chicano lawyer with no fear at all of anything that walks on less than three legs and a de facto suicidal conviction that he will die at the age of 33 – just like Jesus Christ – you have a serious piece of work on your hands. Especially if the bastard is already 33½ years old with a head full of Sandoz acid, a loaded .357 Magnum in his belt, a hatchet-wielding Chicano bodyguard on his elbow at all times, and a disconcerting habit of projectile vomiting geysers of pure blood off the front porch every 30 or 40 minutes, or whenever his malignant ulcer can't handle any more raw tequila."

"One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die."

"All Dickens is packed with orphans or people in uncertain relation to family groups, or clubs. It’s impossible to read anything he wrote without feeling that the question of belonging was a major issue for him. He had to write about these matters. If we read Lovecraft’s science-fiction horror stories, weird and unpleasant as they may be, they are all obsessively about fear of otherness—women’s, people of other races’, aliens’. All the over-heated horror of the books arises from this gut fear. He can’t leave it alone. Whether or not we like the books and quite regardless of any verisimilitude, it’s clear that the author is writing directly from his personal concerns. The stuff wasn’t just constructed for a literary prize. A certain form of repetition, particularly the endless reformulation, in dozens of different guises, of the same core conflict is probably the hallmark of authenticity."

"Virginia Woolf thought one of the pleasures of reading contemporary novels was that they forced you to exercise your judgment. There was no received opinion about a book. You had to decide for yourself whether it was good."

"“Into thirty centuries born,” Edwin Muir began his most celebrated poem, “At home in them all but the very last.” Much is said about escapism in narrative and fiction. But perhaps the greatest escapism of all is to take refuge in the domesticity of the past, the home that history and literature become, avoiding the one moment of time in which we are not at home, yet have to live: the present."

"No, I don’t think it’s correct to define my writing as fables. There are themes, yes, but I’m not trying to offer some categorical cure-it-all to the problematic situation of Man. I’m neither theologian nor a politician. My concern in my first novel, The Zoo, was loss of inner life. After long years of writer’s block, the novel just exploded out of me. Thirty days. All too quickly to really do it justice. With my second novel, The Nihilesthete, I was taken by the spiritual diminishment and the all-pervasive powerlessness that I felt was taking over our culture which in turn prevented and inverted my lead character’s full expression. Such is the motive-force behind almost banal, cerebralized cruelties he harbours upon his arch-enemy, the artist, Brodski."

"Richard Kalich is a successful novelist, one who has succeeded in consistently producing perplexing fictions that fail to categorize themselves and escape the warping influence of authorial intent."

"He's after what it means to be profoundly out of step with one's culture yet still unwilling to let go of the American dream."

"Vito Acconci’s extraordinary career—poetry, art, architecture: a sort of triathlon of the arts—began in the Bronx, where as an aspiring author of seven years he wrote stories about cowboys and athletes. At his Catholic college, he published sexy stuff about priests and nuns that got the school magazine banned for three issues running. He went on to write fiction in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. But when he came back to New York in the early ’60s, something changed, and he began writing poems. Highly conceptual constructions, they did not tell stories, express feelings, or evoke a fictional world. They were not representational. Maybe you could call them presentational: this is a word, this is a sentence, you are reading."

"Якби я був націоналістом, то відповів би тобі, — кажеш повільно й виразно, аж занадто повільно, занадто виразно. — Але який з мене націоналіст, коли я отут з тобою п'ю пиво?"

"До речі, наша солов'їна мова посідає друге у світі місце за милозвучністю."

"Бути п'яним у Москві — це все одно, що мати волосся досить поширеного кольору. Хіба можна докоряти людині за колір її волосся? Мабуть, ні."

"Ви ж знаєте, що в нас тепер вільне виявлення сатиричних думок. Як кажуть, демократія — прекрасна річ, але нічого гіршого людство вигадати не могло."

"Армія вже не здатна виконувати накази пращурів: вона симулює. Вона бридиться вбивати. Це вже не армія — це велике збіговисько педерастів і пацифістів, що, зрештою, одне й те ж."

"Ми навчимо їх перемагати у референдумах. Бо референдум — це Ідеальний спосіб маніпулювати людьми, залишаючи в них ілюзію, нібито вони самі вирішують свою долю."

"На чолі новоспечених, пардон, незалежних урядів виникнуть апробовані нами і нами ж призначені виконавці Хаос породжуватиме хаос. Там, де це неможливо, до влади прийдуть просто виб(…)ки. Або політичні проститутки, Володимире Іллічу."

"Це підкорення світу, це комунізм, це безсмертя мумій у мавзолеях. Це сяйво сонць і правителів. Це вежа, яку будують десять тисяч років. Це сила армій, це спалення відьом, це рух народів, постійний та об'єднавчий. Це велике злягання народів, це поглинання менших більшими, слабших сильнішими."

"Головне переселити чукчів в Араратську долину, а молдаван на Землю Франца-Йосифа, хоч природніше на ній почувалися б австрійці."

"I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been."

"What a thrill, what a shock, to be alive on a morning in June, prosperous, almost scandalously privileged, with a simple errand to run."

"Why doesn't she feel more somber about Richard's perversely simultaneous good fortune ("an anguished, prophetic voice in American letters") and his decline ("You have no T-cells at all, none that we can detect")? What is wrong with her? She loves Richard, she thinks of him constantly, but she perhaps loves the day slightly more."

"The woman's head quickly withdraws, the door to the trailer closes again, but she leaves behind her an unmistakable sense of watchful remonstrance, as if an angel had briefly touched the surface of the world with one sandaled foot, asked if there was any trouble and, being told all was well, had resumed her place in the ether with skeptical gravity, having reminded the children of earth that they are just barely trusted to manage their own business, and that further carelessness will not go unremarked."

"He makes her think sometimes of a mouse singing amorous ballads under the window of a giantess."

"...the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June."

"It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book...What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other."

"...Virginia lingers another moment beside the dead bird in its circle of roses. It could be a kind of hat. It could be the missing link between millinery and death."

"We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds & expectations, to burst open & give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning, we hope, more than anything for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so."

"A celestial light appeared to Barrett Meeks in the sky over Central Park, four days after Barrett had been mauled, once again, by love. It was by no means his first romantic dropkick, but it was the first to have been conveyed by way of a five-line text, the fifth line of which was a crushingly corporate wish for good luck in the future, followed by three lowercase xxx’s."

"The barrenness of sand, as it is usually pictured, was not caused by simple dryness, but apparently was due to the ceaseless movement that made it inhospitable to all living things. What a difference compared with the dreary way human beings clung together year in year out."

"He wanted to believe that his own lack of movement had stopped all movement in the world, the way a hibernating frog abolishes winter."

"Rarely will you meet anyone so jealous as a teacher. Year after year students tumble along like the waters of a river. They flow away, and only the teacher is left behind, like some deeply buried rock at the bottom of the current. Although he may tell others of his hopes, he doesn't dream of them himself. He thinks of himself as worthless and either falls into masochistic loneliness or, failing that, ultimately becomes suspicious and pious, forever denouncing the eccentricities of others. He longs so much for freedom and action that he can only hate people."

"When a castaway collapses from hunger and thirst it is fear of physical want rather than a real want, they say. Defeat begins with the fear that one has lost."

"More than iron doors, more than walls, it is the tiny peephole that really makes the prisoner feel locked in."

"It goes on, terrifyingly repetitive. One could not do without repetition in life, like the beating of the heart, but it was also true that the beating of the heart was not all there was to life."

"Suddenly a sorrow the color of dawn welled up in him. They might as well lick each other's wounds. But they would lick forever, and the wounds would never heal, and in the end their tongues would be worn away."

"Only a shipwrecked person who has just escaped drowning could understand the psychology of someone who breaks out in laughter just because he is able to breathe."

"There is a tremendous irony, hypocrisy, and disabling contradiction at the heart of movement, for, with regards to oppressed nonhuman animals, social justice activists are exclusive, not inclusive; homogenous, not pluralistic; and discriminatory, not "progressive," or "enlightened" in any deep or consistent way. The climate justice movement represents only one animal species – Homo sapiens -- to the systematic exclusion of millions of others, known and unknown. The overwhelming majority of living species on this planet are gravely affected by capitalist domination, expansionism, climate change, and human exploitation generally -- including “radicals” and “progressives” who believe the proper place for many animals is on their dinner plate or a fast-food menu. Not surprisingly, moreover, in social justice writings generally one finds little mention of the rapid acceleration of a ', this one caused by humans, not natural forces. This mass extinction event, along with runaway climate change, defines a rupture in Earth and human history. It is a fundamental defining aspect of the Anthropocene epoch, a key cause of system ecological breakdown today, and fundamental to the "existential crisis" threatening all humanity."

"Throughout the last ten thousand years of history, human empires rose and fall, crumbling into pebbles and dust. Over the last two hundred thousand years, an even larger empire began its mighty and perilous ascent. From its home base in Africa, it established its presence everywhere throughout the globe, expanding endlessly in all directions, growing exponentially in numbers, colonizing land, other species, and entire peoples. Insatiable in its consumption of natural resources, addicted to growth, it left death, extinction, and destruction everywhere in its wake. This vast conglomerate was not the Persian, Greek, Roman, Mayan, Ottoman, English, or American empires, but the consequence and aggregate of all particular empires and unsustainable hierarchical societies, namely, the human empire."

"Today we call this planetary monolith "global capitalism," but humans became global animals tens of thousands of years before the onset of capitalism. Humans created hierarchical and growth-addicted societies some ten thousand years ago and their ecocidal proclivities stretch back millennia more into prehistory. And just like every political empire of the past, the human empire has possibly reached its zenith and begun its downward spiral toward collapse. This empire's peak and slide into catastrophe marks a new epoch not only in human history, but also the history of the earth. Debates over whether advanced societies have entered into a new "postmodernity" pale in significance to the scientifically-based proposition that human activity has created a new epoch in geological history--the age of the Anthropocene. This epoch characterized by the dominance of human influence over earth's systems and has led to, among other colossal events, a sixth mass extinction crisis and runaway climate change."

"One of the key contradictions of capitalism is that its expansion rates are so rapid and vast that the system consumes ever more of the life systems necessary for humans to survive. Capitalism destroys its own conditions of reproduction – the biological foundation of life on which it parasitically depends."

"Like humans, pathogens do not respect species boundaries. Overall, nearly eight billion people, many with advanced technologies and rapacious appetites, are tearing ecosystems apart and within these ecosystems live millions of different kinds of viruses, bacteria, and other pathogens. As observes in her book Pandemic, society operates with an erroneous paradigm of disease, treating diseases as foreign invaders into our territory (a mentality she describes as “microbial xenophobia”), when in fact we are the invading species encroaching on the habitat and communities of animals and ecosystems. It is wrong to say that these diseases are happening to us, rather they are the unintended results of what we are doing to the natural world. Speculations about accidental laboratory origins of outbreaks and COVID-19 conspiracy plots of bioterrorism draw attention away from actual systemic structures and dynamics of human exploitation of nature, especially as driven by the growth-addicted world system of capitalism. Hardly unexpected or accidental, viral outbreaks are the inevitable consequences of human growth and expansion. All too often, we are the causes, not effects, the culprits, not victims, of pandemic-inducing pathogens."

"Why is it, we must ask, that the microbes that have existed for ages suddenly begin “causing” diseases? In the last fifty years, we have lost over 60% of all , as over three hundred infectious diseases have emerged or remerged around the world. It is no coincidence this is happening as the human empire expands and globalization increases. diseases spillover to humans far more readily in disrupted and fragment systems than intact and diverse ecosystems. Not only are humans consuming wildlife in markets, they are trafficking in wild animals for food and “medicine,” and opening up new global routes for the transmission of zoonotic disease."

"The desperate and tragic migration of oppressed people throughout the world, involves not only a humanitarian crisis testing the moral resolve of developed nations, but also a calamity for wildlife and ecological systems. The most simplistic response to immigration is to seal borders, while never addressing the root causes of human movement. But barriers, fences, and walls not only thwart human traffic, they impede the natural flow of nonhuman animals and plants and directly affect their migration routes and reproduction. This threatens the survival of nonhuman communities and contributes to the growing problems of and . This in turn affects human interests in crucial ways, and the erection of barriers along borders has a systemic impact on all communities of life – humans, animals, and ecosystems."

"Walls solve nothing. They don’t stop desperate people, address the causes of migration, or blot out promise of a better life. They are a feeble technofix for deep-rooted social, political, and economic problems. They benefit no one but the nefarious agents, agencies, and corporations behind the migrant-industrial complex. Any serious policy approach to immigration would address the systemic causes of migration, not tinker with its effects. For the mass migration of desperate peoples are driven by global capitalism, neoliberalism, the imperialist reordering of , and the military-backed plundering of underdeveloped countries. The current global order requires harsh exploitation, drastic inequality, political violence, suffering and immiseration — all now exacerbated by runaway ."

"Whereas the unconscious operations and blind forces of the planet have provoked turbulent changes over the last 4.5 billion years of earth’s evolutionary history, now change is being directed by a conscious and volitional agent – "humanity." We cannot speak of humanity equally, to be sure, as the problem was caused by the industrialized capitalist West and the poorer nations who contributed least to will be hit the hardest. But nations such as China, India, and Brazil are major contributors, and the cumulative impact of 7.5 billion people on the planet is causing extinction and collapse everywhere. The stability of the is now gone, changes are accelerating beyond our understanding and control, and chaos waits at our door."

"In addition to becoming vegan, the second powerful choice a person can make is the political choice to broaden resistance and become part of a planetary justice and liberation movement. First, veganism has to be connected to broader social issues such as food justice, community empowerment, class, race, and sustainability. Second, we need to create a broader shift from veganism to anti-speciesism, which facilitates real political action. This creates a profound paradigm shift, for veganism has already been thoroughly co-opted and commodified by capitalist industries, media, and culture. The mainstreaming of veganism removes it from the sphere of inter-species justice and politics to the zone of human health and individual consumption, into a lifestyle practice that challenges neither consumer nor speciesist identities. In direct contrast, anti-speciesism assaults human supremacism and shifts the focus from products and markets to the animal holocaust and the need for political struggle. Unlike “veganism,” anti-speciesism is also . Thus, third, we need to connect the anti-speciesist/animal liberation movement to other social and environmental movements, with an emphasis on the emergency and systemic consequences of climate change. This two-fold shift in focus transforms veganism from a domesticated, toothless, apolitical form of consumer capitalism to vital leg of a new total liberation movement."

"The project of human liberation and environmental sustainability will fail without giving equal importance to anti-speciesism and animal liberation. We cannot leave intact the predatory and violent mentalities that inform our exploitative relations with animals and inform our exploitation of other humans and natural world. And to make these connections, we must all fight the Right and the rise of fascism, which has appropriated ecology for its own political purposes."

"We need to end fossil fuel energy and global in favor of new energy and food production systems. We need to radically reduce human populations and consumption to repair ecosystems and restore wildlife populations. We need new ethics, new value, new worldviews, and a completely new socio-economic system."

"The omnicidal regimes of 'civilization' and global capitalism have reached their zenith and will end - whether through an ascendent global resistance stronger than this dying world system, or through the cataclysmic adjustments the planet already has initiated, such as those that will ensure its evolution for billions of years to come."

"A politics of total liberation could forge alliances more positive and powerful than anything yet created. It could emancipate not just one class, interest group, or even the entire human species from the grip of a nihilistic power elite (that value nothing but power and profit), but also animal communities everywhere, ecosystems worldwide, and the dynamic energies of evolution and speciation currently blocked by human "progress.""

"Without understanding the co-evolution of human and other animals, and the systemic psychological, social, and ecological crises brought about by speciesism, animal domestication, the rise of agricultural society, and the "Might is Right" psychosis of civilization, we cannot formulate a viable theory of history, hierarchy and power, or of social organization and change. Without the animal standpoint, we cannot adequately understand human conflict, the dynamics of warfare, the pathology of violence and genocide, the alienation of humans from one another and the natural world, and the dynamics driving the current ecological crisis, such as stem principally from corporate agriculture and the global livestock industry. And if we cannot understand the key causes of our current crisis, then we surely cannot solve them, nor forge a better culture, humanity, and future for ourselves and all life forms on this planet."

"Animal liberation is a movement of and by human animals for nonhuman animals. Where animals are enslaved, ethically responsible humans arguably have a duty to liberate them. Answering this call of conscience and duty, animal rights/liberation groups have sprouted throughout the world, with the ultimate objective of freeing captive animals from systems of exploitation and overcoming speciesist institutions and mindsets."

"If physical force is needed to save an animal from attack, then that force is a legitimate form of what I call "extensional self defense." This principle mirrors US penal code statutes known as the "necessity defense," which can be invoked when a defendant believed that an illegal act was necessary to avoid great and imminent harm. One only needs to expand this concept slightly to cover actions that are increasingly desperate and necessary to protect animals from the total war against them."

"Since the first emerged in 1976, it staged dramatic raids on vivisection laboratories, especially in the United States during the 1980s. From 1996 to 2005, after the ALF nearly eliminated the fur industry in England, tactics closed down a half dozen breeders who supplied animals to laboratories, and liberationists stopped construction of a major animal research center at Cambridge University and almost at Oxford as well. If not for the massive intervention by British and American governments, activists might have bankrupted and destroyed a major pharmaceutical and product testing company, ."

"In a global setting, contextualism asks this question: How can we best defend all life and the entire planet from the massive and unrelenting assault of global capitalism, centralized political rule, militarism, and the metastasizing growth of the human empire colonizing the earth and monopolizing its resources? Questions concerning the legitimacy and efficacy of physical force cannot be answered in the abstract, but only in specific contexts. Whereas partisans on both sides want to read the history of moral progress as driven exclusively by nonviolence or violence, the fact is that social change unfolds through the entire arsenal of pressure tactics, which include strikes, protests, demonstrations, boycotts, sabotage, liberation, education, legislation or even armed struggle."

"Unless the intensity of our defense of life matches the ferocity of the assault against it, we allow a greater violence to grow exponentially until an earth once teeming with life becomes a mass graveyard, a battered wasteland, and a toxic cesspool. Then, when it is finally too late, the unfortunates who remain will grasp what the radicals tried to convey: what the logic of growth and capitalism finally wrought, the colossal failure of human vision and will, and the complicity of pacifism with the greatest violence of all."

"As with most environmentalists, the overriding concern of the Left is with fisheries, not fish; with forests, not its nonhuman inhabitants; with "resources" for human use, not animals with inherent value. Ecological concerns stem not from a "" respect for the intrinsic value of all life and the earth, but rather from the Left's oxymoronic concept of "enlightened " that reduces animals and the natural world to mere means to human ends and is incapable of advancing a new planetary ethic to inform a truly sustainable mode of life."

"Attacking the new slave economy as it does, the animal liberation movement is a significant threat to global capital. Animal liberation challenges large sectors of the capitalist economy by assailing corporate agriculture and pharmaceutical giants and their suppliers. Far from being irrelevant to social movements, animal rights can form the basis for a broad coalition of progressive social groups and drive changes that strike at the heart of capitalist exploitation of animals, people, and the earth."

"A future revolutionary movement worthy of its name will grasp the ancient conceptual roots of hierarchy and domination, such as emerged in the practices of early agricultural societies. It will incorporate a new ethics (ecology and animal liberation) and politics of nature that overcomes instrumentalism and hierarchical thinking and institutions in every pernicious form possible. It will grasp the incompatibility of capitalism with the most profound values and goals of humanity. It will build on the achievements of democratic, socialist, and anarchist traditions. It will incorporate , feminist, LGBT, and indigenous struggles. It will repudiate ideologies and unequivocally reject alliances or association with the . It will merge human, animal, and earth liberation in a total liberation struggle against global capitalism and domination in of all kinds."

"is a brash, arrogant, brilliant, ignorant, and menacing species that in a very short period of time has colonized the entire planet and left death, destruction, and extinction everywhere it went. In an era of ecological crisis marked by species extinction, , desertification, resource shortages, and climate change, the epithet "wise man" is intolerably pretentious and false. If intelligence and wisdom entails the ability to survive, exercise foresight, and adapt to one's environment, then countless animal species are far more intelligent than human beings."

"There can be no full or even adequate understanding of the systemic problems of capitalist society, of the origins and dynamics of hierarchy, and of a future rational, autonomous, ethical, and ecological society until we address the 10,000-year legacy of speciesism and the barbaric exploitation of other animals."

"We now face the grim choice posed by revolutionaries over the last two centuries, which involved "revolution or barbarism." Our situation has deteriorated so dramatically that we must choose between revolution or ecological collapse, mass extinction, and possibly our own demise. The twenty-first century is a time of reckoning."

"Despite the inspirational platitude, we must realize that failure is an option. Our future is problematic at best and doomed at worst. There is no inherent purpose we are here to fulfill, no destiny at which we are assured to arrive at in glory, however tardy, tattered, bruised, and blackened we might be. There are no guiding angels to protect us from failure and no God to save us from an apocalypse. Countless millions of species have been annihilated in past , our Homo ancestors are gone forever, we are dispatching thousands of other species into oblivion, and there is nothing but the determination of aware, concerned, and committed peoples to save Homo sapiens from vanishing into nothingness as well. As Michael Boulter notes, the earth is a self-organizing system that strives toward balance, and species lose out, if necessary, to the larger dynamics of ecological imperatives. "Extinctions are an essential stimulus to the evolutionary process," and humans are not only expendable in the overall calculus, their demise would be a positive and necessary event."

"Fuelled by new forms of science and technology, military expansion, and aggressive colonization of southern nations and the developing world, capitalism evolved into a truly global system. Global capital is inspired by neoliberal visions of nations as resource pools and open markets operating without restrictions. The process euphemistically termed "globalization" is driven by multinational corporations such as and ; financed by financial goliaths such as the and the (IMF), and legally protected by the World Trade Organization (WTO). It homogenizes nations into a single economic organism and trading bloc through arrangements such as the (NAFTA), the (FTAA), and the European Union (EU). Multinationals seduce, bribe, and coerce nations to open their markets and help drive down labor costs to a bare minimum, and rely heavily on corrupt dictators, loans and debt, and “hit men” and armies to enforce the rule of their “structural transformations” of societies into conduits for the flow of resources and capital. Globalization has produced trade laws that protect transnational corporations at the expense of human life, biodiversity, and the environment. It is accompanied by computerization of all facets of production and expanding automation, generating heightened , corporate downsizing, and greater levels of unemployment, inequality, insecurity, and violence."

"By no means is globalization to be understood as an inherently negative dynamic or consequence of human history, as if the desideratum is fragmentation, isolation, provincialism, and nationalism. Ever since Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa and dispersed itself globally across the continents, human existence has been a global dynamic and knowledge, culture, and technologies have spread in all directions, such as with the influence of Islam on the West. Certainly, from the standpoint of the natural environment and the countless animal species driven into extinction, the rapid global growth of human populations, technologies, and economies has not been a positive development. But dissemination of knowledge, culture, and people is a positive and enriching process; indeed, it is now urgent that the paradigm shift from economics and growth to ecology and sustainability take root on a global scale. A salient distinction to be made here is between globalization from above (as dictated by multinational capital) and globalization from below (as realized in self-organizing and democratic ways by people in cultural exchange and open movement)."

"As the corporate machines continue to slash and burn the planet, inequalities widen and power grows, logics of profit and control spread through social institutions, human numbers and the insatiable appetites of the global consumer society swell as the biodiversity of flora and fauna steeply declines, it is easy to become not only cautious or pessimistic about the prospects for planetary peace and freedom, but fatalistic and nihilistic. In the schools and social movement discourse, we are beginning to hear from some who appear resigned to the catastrophe playing out on this planet. Others, however, remain oblivious to this incredible moment in time and the epic tragedy of resigning humanity’s fate to be a failed primate species because of its inability to harness the evolutionary advantages of a large forebrain or overcome its predilection to tribalism, xenophobia, hubris, hierarchy, violence, alienation from nature and other life forms, and uncontrolled growth."

"If Francione and Hall were next to a baby seal about to be clubbed to death and the only way they could stop it would be to physically intervene in some aggressive and violent way, or at least to grab and throw the weapon into the sea (an act that earned Paul Watson expulsion from , an organization he co-founded), would they do it? Or would they stand idly by and watch, perhaps making a moral argument for or a plea to the sealer's inner goodness or moral conscience, as he drives the spiked club into the seal's head, grinning ear-to-ear while proceeding to strip the skin off its bloodied but still breathing body?"

"We consider this a case of how nonviolence leads to violence when pacifists refuse to intervene when violence is occurring, as the capitalist speciesist butchers bash the brains and carve up the planet knowing their violence is protected by the shield of nonviolence practiced by opponents with dulled instincts and a slave mentality, opponents who throw down their weapons before entering into battle. The fundamentalist pacifist argument is an ideal pertinent to communities of saints but not to a society of human beings rooted in both a social and biological past riddled with violence, murder and genocide. Nonviolence should be the first option, but not the only option."

"In just 10,000 years time, a millisecond of geological time, Homo sapiens civilization, embodied by the repulsively repacious paradigm of Western speciesist capitalism and anthropocentrism has managed to push the planet to the brink of ecological collapse."

"We don't deny that widespread veganism would go a long way toward mitigating the planet's dire problems with climate change, rainforest destruction, water pollution, desertification, resource scarcity, hunger, social conflicts, and species extinction. But considering the facts that the concept of veganism emerged in 1944 and in 65 years no more than 2% of the human population has embraced veganism, and that world flesh consumption has increased five-fold from 1950 to 1997, the singular devotion to vegan education (and its resultant sweeping dismissal of myriad other potential strategies) is clearly a tactical dead-end and losing strategy. Raging flesh consumption is shredding the vegan paradigm, and despite some gains the vegan and animal rights cause is rapidly losing ground and hemorrhaging badly. Emerging capitalist entities with huge populations, like China and India, are driving the demand for rotting animal corpses and other animal-derived products through the roof as the disease of consumerism - stoked by Madison Avenue advertising - whets the appetites of the populace for hamburgers, bacon, fried chicken, eggs, and milk shakes, all conveniently provided by the scourge of fast-food outlets and the globalization of the ."

"The net result of millennia of , and roughly two hundred thousand years of the reign of Homo sapiens as a whole, is hideously visible in the current involving dynamics such as air and water pollution, acid rain, genetic crop pollution, chemical poisoning, species extinction, rainforest destruction, coral reef deterioration, disappearance of wetlands, , and global warning. This planetary crisis is caused by forces that include , hyperdevelopment, , , agribusiness, militarism, and a cancerous greed for power and profit that consumes, entraps, or kills everything in its path."

"Increasingly, calls for moderation, compromise, and the slow march through institutions can be seen as treacherous and grotesquely inadequate. With the planet in the throes of dramatic climate change, ecological destabilization, and the crisis in its history (this one having human not natural causes), "reasonableness" and "moderation" seem to be entirely unreasonable and immoderate, as "extreme" and "radical" actions appear simply as necessary and appropriate. After decades of environmental struggles in the west, we are nevertheless losing ground in the battle to preserve species, ecosystems, wilderness, and human communities. Politics as usual just won't cut it anymore"

"There are key similarities between what has been called "radical environmentalism" — which includes , , , , and — and what we term "revolutionary environmentalism." Among other things, both approaches reject mainstream environmentalism, attack core ideologies and/or institutions that have caused the ecological crisis, often adopt spiritual outlooks and see nature as sacred, reject the binary opposition separating humans from nature, and in many cases defend or adopt illegal tactics such as civil disobedience or monkeywrenching. However, a key distinguishing trait of revolutionary environmentalism is that it supports and/or employs illegal tactics ranging from for the purpose of economic sabotage to and armed struggle, recognizing that violent methods of resistance are often appropriate against fascist regimes and . Revolutionary environmentalism seeks to counter forces of oppression with equally potent forms of resistance, and uses militant tactics when they are justified, necessary, and effective. With the advance of the global capitalist juggernaut and increasing deterioration of the Earth's ecological systems, ever more people may realize that no viable future will arise without militant actions and large-scale social transformation, a process that requires abolishing global capitalism and imperialism, and would thereby embrace revolutionary environmentalism."

"Detractors insist that it is only a matter of time before the ALF inadvertently kills someone or pursues a course of violence. Some critics argue that the ALF has already injured or killed people, but they confuse the ALF with ultra-radical English groups such as the and the . While in solidarity with the ALF on many points, the Animal Rights Militia, the Justice Department, and the feel the ALF is too conservative in its policy of nonviolence. In contrast, they openly espouse physical violence against animal oppressors, unable to fathom why some believe that a human life has absolute value, especially if it involves a person inflicting violence upon animals. Consequently, these pro-violence groups employ fake poisoning scares to force companies to pull their products from the shelves. They target exploiters with booby-trapped letters fitted with poisoned razor blades. They set off bombs and they issue death threats. The Animal Rights Militia, the Justice Department, and the Revolutionary Cells graduated from the “all is justified” school, and they aim to ratchet up the conflict between activists and industry to new levels. Razor blade letters, bomb threats or bomb attacks, arson, harassment, death threats, and physical assaults have proven to be effective means of preventing and ending animal exploitation, and therefore will continue to be used by the most militant elements of the struggle."

"But it is important to clearly distinguish between such groups and the ALF, and to keep in mind that when a "radical" animal rights group threatens or commits violence, it is not acting in conformity with the ALF philosophy. Indeed, it could easily be a framing action by the state or an animal exploitation industry, intended to discredit the cause of animal liberation. True, ALF spokespersons and supporters have sometimes expressed violent sentiments against animal abusers, and phrases such as "do whatever it takes" and "animal liberation by any means necessary" can give credence to charges that the ALF has a violent edge. But given the enormity and magnitude of animal suffering, and the righteous anger that animal liberationists feel, one should notice that the ALF has demonstrated remarkable restraint in their war of liberation."

"Torching a research or laboratory is considered more heinous than anally electrocuting foxes or conducting tests, which pour industrial chemicals into the bodies of animals until half of them die. The loss of one building is deemed more noteworthy than the devastation of rainforests or the eradication of species. Critics whine about the possibility of physical violence by the ALF but fall silent before the actuality of , animal massacres, and on a global scale. They decry death threats, but never death. They condemn activist pressure against animal exploiters but condone the violence thugs direct against activists. The US is rife with volatile anti-government and hate groups — ranging from militiamen to right-wing Christian zealots — that have a long record of violence, including killing hundreds of people in the , yet the state positions the ALF above all of them as the more dangerous "domestic terrorism" threat."

"In the battle over animal rights, negotiations are breaking down and boundaries are being erased on both sides. Government and industry thugs unleash violence on activists, while groups such as the Animal Rights Militia, the Justice Department, the Hunt Retribution Squad, and the Revolutionary Cells openly advocate violence against animal abusers. More and more activists grow tired of adhering to a nonviolent code of ethics while violence from the enemy increases. Realizing that non-violence against animal exploiters in fact is a pro-violence stance that tolerates their blood spilling without taking adequate measures to stop it, a new breed of freedom fighters has ditched Gandhi for Machiavelli and switched principled nonviolence with the amoral (not to be confused with immoral) pragmatism that embraces animal liberation "by any means necessary.""

"A civil war is unfolding — one between forces hell-bent on exploiting animals and the earth for profit whatever the toll, and activists steeled to resist this omnicide tooth and nail. We are witnessing not only the long-standing corporate war against nature, but also a new social war about nature."

"Words define reality, and the earth and animal liberation movements must resist being defined as violent fanatics and extremists. They must defend themselves rhetorically and philosophically, establishing a sharp distinction between animal and earth liberation, property destruction, protests and demonstrations on one side, and bona fide violence and terrorism on the other side. They must expose for all to see the charlatans and real terrorists in state and corporate garb who fulminate against honorable dissidents and freedom fighters from behind their Oz-like curtain."

"Like the "," the "" is phony, a front for the war on privacy, liberty, and democracy. Only counter-terrorists can defeat terrorists. May the armies of the animal, earth, and human liberationists rise and multiply in a perfect war against the oppressors of the earth."

"I ask myself: Is the outlook of this book comic? Is it tragic? Is the story best served by a first person narrator who's telling his or her story? Is it best served by an omniscient narrator who can stand above and make connections about the characters and society and politics? Part of figuring out how to tell the story is tone and voice, the same way I'm picking characters and places."

"My compulsion to write the story was from seeing so many people go unpunished, and so many innocents' stories being untold…"

"Elwood and Turner represent two different parts of my personality…There is the optimistic or hopeful part of me [in Elwood] that believes we can make the world a better place if we keep working at it. Then there’s the pessimistic side, the cynical side [in Turner] that says no—this country is founded on genocide, murder, and slavery and it will always be that way. That’s our dilemma as human beings: How do we reconcile the hopeful with our pessimistic side? How do we reconcile disappointments with the small daily times that make up our lives? I don’t know [any more] than anybody else.… For the characters [in the novel] there’s the problem of, How do you come back from a life-changing catastrophe?...Bouncing back from trauma, you borrow from a sense of hope…but also recognize what you’ve gone through and what you’re up against."

"I never know when I start out. You know, I sort of know what the ending is. I know where the characters always end up, and I usually have an image of the last page before I start. I'm a big outliner. But you can't know everything and you have to be open to discovery…"

"The way he saw it, living taught you that you didn’t have to live the way you’d been taught to live. You came from one place but more important was where you decided to go."

"Colson Whitehead, Charles Dickens and Octavia Butler — fascinating writers who carved out their own dominions in literature and who, in wholly unique fashion, changed writing for the rest of us."

"If you sit with your memories, you might as well become a plant."

"God tells us men fucking men is a terrible thing, but a father offering his two daughters, vestal virgins no less, to a horde of horny buggers is heroic. Now that's straight. … God destroys the faggots with fire and brimstone. He turns a disobedient wife into salt. But he asks us to idolize drunks who sleep with their daughters or offer them to a horny, unruly mob."

"One of the things that was obvious to me after I started getting upset about so many things was, I wasn’t upset at the world, I was upset at myself,” he said. “Somewhere along the line, 1996, all my friends died, and I decided that to be able to survive, I must put everything aside. And I did. That was the date, by the way, that I started writing my first book….All of a sudden, I’m a writer. I have a career, I have a life. I wasn’t thinking, I wasn’t remembering. Jacob begins the book by getting upset at these young gay men for forgetting queer history, but it’s him, it’s me, that allowed people to forget, because I forgot."

"I get upset about what is taken as great literature and what is cute and exotic."

"I don't sit down to write something politically or to challenge stereotypes. Being who I am, almost everything I do will be political, almost everything I do will be a challenge to those stereotypes…"

"For years, I have been heralding the work of Rabih Alameddine, a Lebanese-American writer. His prose is gorgeous, his approach irreverent, and the ideas in his stories are sometimes comical or fantastical, but always deadly serious — very relevant to understanding the complex history behind multiple holy wars today. In Italy and Spain, his books are best sellers. He has full-page profiles in major newspapers, has garnered prizes, is a darling of literary festivals and has won acclaim from international writers. In the U.S., he’s hardly known. Why is there a geographic divide in literary appreciation?"

"Get it into your thick head that jokes are just like life. Things that begin badly, end badly. Everything's fine in the middle, it's the end you need to worry about."

"Original in Romanian:"

":Poem of the same title. Stanza 1, line 2, p. 10"

": Big Bang . Stanza 2, lines 12–20, p. 48"

": 'Motto' poem Lumina – [undă pe corzi] ("The Light – [wave on strings]"). Pp. 186; the last cover"

": Lumina – [undă pe corzi] ("The Light – [wave on strings]"). Stanza 3, lines 44–47, p. 188"

": Adeverindu-se Sieşi ("Convincing Oneself to Be True"). Stanza 1, lines 1–4, p. 10 (14)"

": Bunul simţ-al măsurii ("The Common Sense of Measure"). Stanza 1, lines 1–12 (1–14), p. 16 (20)"

": Continuum estetic ("An Aesthetic Continuum"). Stanza 1, lines 1–10, p. 28 (32)"

": Dizolvând ne-Fiinţa ("Dissolving The Non-Being"). Stanza 1, lines 1–3, p. 34 (38)"

": Geneză ("Genesis"). Stanza 1, lines 1–8, p. 73 (79)"

"The idea – deepness and relief"

": Hyperboreea ("Hyperborea"). Stanza 3, lines 29–30, p. 83 (87)"

": Joc optic ("Optical Game"). Stanza 4, lines 67–70 (69–72), p. 105 (111)"

": Remanenţă ("Remanence"). Stanza 3, lines 37–42, p. 182 (188)"

": Şi totuşi... actul meu liric de pietate ("And Yet... My Lyric Act of Piety"). Stanza 3, lines 28–30 (27–30), p. 206 (212)"

": Ţărmul vast-al gândirii ("The Vast Shore of The Thinking"). Stanza 1, lines 1–5, p. 223 (229)"

": Viaţa poetului – la hotarul dintre poezie şi ştiinţă ("The Poet’s Life – at The Border between Poetry and Science"). Stanza 4, lines 55–58 (57–61), p. 254 (260–261)"

": Ylem. Stanza 3, lines 44–45 (44–46), p. 283 (289)"

": Zbor în decor al Ideii-înseşi-de-zbor ("A Fly in The Sky of The very Idea of a Flight"). Stanza 3, lines 31–35, p. 292 (300)"

"Original title in Romanian: Luminile omului: lirica filosofică (Univers Enciclopedic Gold Publishing House: Bucharest, 2020), pp. 470. . OCLC 1240152154."

"Just as the ritual of life has materialized on earth since ancient times, persisting even today in the gentle light of the sun, the poetic expression establishes itself in our tangible world like a gentle sunray that confirms that the human destiny originated in the being. However, as one can notice, in the eternal corroborative kaleidoscope of existence, the contemporary society is nothing but the fruit of the creative power of the wise man that intensely investigates the direct reality, from one end to the other, to the most hidden details, and imagines it in its infinity, even if, ignoring the play with the nothingness and the barriers of the heart, today there is no doubt that the same reality is indefinitely broader than reason and than man’s illusory ambitions to truly appropriate the mysteries of the universe. The rhetoric of my (purely metaphysical) verse does nothing but interrogate the vast universe of the human condition, consubstantially transposed by the instance of the poetic thought on the eternal winding path of the natural intramundane dimension."

":In Argument poetic ("Poetic argument"), p. 3"

"Haloed with the nonchalance of the light beyond death, in the galactic trench that vaguely separates us, oh, you – dear reader!, held in the palm of the same echo of the star trembling, full of grace, from afar, what better hook than your soul fabulously emerged from a book?"

":In Argument poetic ("Poetic argument"), p. 4"

": À bon entendeur, salut! Stanza 1, lines 1–7, p. 5"

": Absent în agorá ("Absent in the Agora"). Stanza 2, lines 16–29, p. 9"

": Axis mundi. Stanza 3, lines 30–40, p. 26"

": Clinamen. Stanza 6, lines 55–60, p. 48"

": Dacă eu aș pleca? (What if I Left?). Stanza 4, lines 41–52, p. 60"

": Fericirea înaltei mirări (The Happiness of the Great Wonder). Stanza 1, lines 1–4, p. 103"

": Grădina cuantică (The Quantum Garden). Stanza 7, lines 42–48, p. 132"

": Instanța lirică (The Lyrical Instance). Stanza 6, lines 57–60, p. 166"

": Zugravul (The Painter). Stanza 2, lines 8–14, p. 445"

"Natively in-spaced by the reflex of some experiences deeply rooted in the womb of the diversity which characterises the 'the worlds of man', whence springs the light of congeneric verses being born 'in the magical logic' of the metaphysical thrill of passage, the journey of thought and feelings undertaken by the physicist-cosmologist poet, begins and unfolds through his very substance, in the dominant tone of the Existent, from his fertile interiority, that is, from and towards the 'originary', in the Einsteinian shift towards red of the spectral lines..., of things. And all this against the 'musical' background of highly accurate poetic-philosophical projections, untainted by the ephemeral, which are subsumed to the logical introspection of the evolution over time of theories aiming at the scientific knowledge of the phenomenon itself."

"The poet is a Magician, Theosophist, Philosopher, Scholar and Astrophysicist. Definitely erudition, the supersaturation of a modern knowledge are complementary to a soteriology which does not take the risk of the blamed skeptical categorizing of a sociology of "mystification". Had he not have the inborn call to the foundation of the feeling of his existential mood, Dumitru Găleşanu would not have heard about us, his readers, either from "the temple of the book", or from the "desk" from where – like an Orpheus raised from the Myth up to the surface of the "endured labyrinth", tried hard, actually speaking, to pick Eurydice up from the darkness of an (eventual) complicity with Hades... But can the beast in the human being be tamed by such a new knowledge (intuition-mystic reason-transmodernism) – and can it be eluded through Poetry (imitatio Dei) – La condition humaine, Montaigne’s stigma? What would "tragic condition" mean if not its contraries for the regeneration, or the eternal return?"

"At a time when poetic experiments have grown weary, when petty self-referentiality and the lamentations of the civic self have replaced the thrills of the exponential Self, when the benevolent propagandistic impulse, far more insidious than that imposed by totalitarian ideologies, manifests itself with irrepressible ease, a poetry that looks upward, that contemplates stellar combustions and perceives quanta of light, that investigates multiple universes and the entire existence itself solely through the lens of incorruptible thought and major acts of consciousness seems, if not impossible, at least of maximum strangeness. Despite this assumption, drawn directly from the configuration of the contemporary lyrical phenomenon, a discourse such as that contained in Dumitru Găleşanu Axioms of Infinity proves that everything is possible and that minor times have no way of supressing or thwarting major stakes. In a certain way, Găleşanu’s discourse, paradoxical in its ability to be simultaneously geometric and alluvial, does precisely that, it eludes historical time, escapes from the circumstances of concrete life imperceptibly transforms itself into a surprising oracular voice."

"A strange poetry is proposed to us by Dumitru Găleşanu, defying the limits of the poetic through his predilection for grand, resonant and abstract words, into which he instils a pathetic dynamism of a spectacular and rare innocence. Ancient and perennial literary motifs intertwine within the same poem with postmodern themes (some even of the most recent kind), yet the author’s plea is neither in favour of tradition nor of contemporaneity. His goal is the rediscovery, through poetry, of an essential nature and an essential humanity – a naturalness thanks to which the 'archetype of matter' might be held 'in the palm of the hand'. Dumitru Găleşanu proves to be a fervent follower of cosmodernity, the very logic of his poetry tends to be a cosmodern one."

"Dumitru Găleșanu is a rare poet nowadays (and not only nowadays). His metaphysical, authentic and irrepressible vocation opposes the aesthetic lightness without a real spiritual creativity of the most contemporary poets immersed in the dailiness of things, conjuncture and minimalism, in a mimetic modern era (N. Frye). In his poems, the tangible elements of reality that incite his eye, heart, thought and word acquire a metaphysical wing that elevates them to transcendence, projected on a cosmic screen that valorizes them. The vibration of the heart and thought is a priority in his poetry together with the spiritual vision, combining the reality of the "up-to-date" knowledge with the poetic imaginary, its rhythm dictating the layout of the verses, many times placed in multiple calligramic configurations."

"Dumitru Găleșanu shows a great loyalty to his poetic world and art. A sort of profound noosphere dealing with mathematics and metaphysics while everything happens with the aim of a poetic appeal. In other words, Dumitru’s poetics cannot avoid the poetry of science and, at the same time, the science of poetry, as a whole, mutually involved, in search of a new cosmology whose paradigm is constantly revised while the latter acquires or inherits the poetry of complexity of the reality of the world itself."

"Existentialism"

"Postmodernism"

"Human nature"

"Meaning of life"