Postmodern Authors

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Human friends, friends in hardship and in life, this is our pure love, love of mother and son."

"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."

"With her alone I could be far away from everyone."

"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."

"'It must be nice to think there is a true reality,' says Miss Callendar. 'I've always found reality a matter of great debate.'"

"'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.'"

"Genitals are a great distraction to scholarship."

"'I think, George,' says Merion, ' the trouble is that you don't have a conflict model of society.'"

"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.'"

"The English are polite by telling lies. The Americans are polite by telling the truth."

"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."

"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."

"'Look, Felicity,' says Howard, 'there's only one rule. Follow the line of your own desires.'"

"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."

"With sociology one can do anything and call it work."

"Well," said Dr Jochum, "you are like all reformers. You like to reform the world because it is easier than trying to reform yourself."

"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."

"[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."

"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."

"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."

""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.”"

"For months I had been trying to be less myself."

"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.”"

"[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."

"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"

"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."

"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"