“Objects don’t die like we do. They are silent and eerily immortal unless acted upon.”
– Aurora Mattia, The Fifth Wound
“Objects don’t die like we do. They are silent and eerily immortal unless acted upon.”
– Aurora Mattia, The Fifth Wound
“The dream was not a museum or an archive, but a way of relating to time through trinkets and old treasures, bearing on their surfaces the traces of other rooms, other afternoons and other passions…”
– Aurora Mattia, The Fifth Wound
“And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.”
William Gibson, Count Zero
“…for him, desiring with an audience means scrambling the cohesion of his solitude, means opening himself to chaos when what he wants is to want with total freedom, without any responsibility, without any possibility of failure or pain.”
– Aurora Mattia, The Fifth Wound
“I am reading it right now, at 4:18 a.m., arranging and rearranging a few symbols as irritating and irresolvable as grains of sand; I turn and turn them on my tongue, right now there is sand in my teeth because I never pretend to be interested in anything other than my few symbols, you know them by now, I don’t need to spell them out for you.”
– Aurora Mattia, The Fifth Wound
“Daylight was a terrible confession, it was like admitting you were going to die one day at the exact location of your body.”
– Aurora Mattia, The Fifth Wound
“My favorite genre of literature is gossip. My second favorite is prayer. But sometimes those are one and the same.”
– Aurora Mattia, The Fifth Wound
“A spell is a brief and local refutation of the crush of precedent.”
– Aurora Mattia, The Fifth Wound
“Really I wanted making phrases to be a way of making love, wanted words to be organic matter as vital and irreducible as cum…”
– Aurora Mattia, The Fifth Wound
“The fact that through a work of art a truth is experienced that we cannot attain in any other way constitutes the philosophic importance of art, which asserts itself against all attempts to rationalize it away.”
– Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth & Method
“I remember that I took leave of my apartment in twenty minutes… If one had an idea of how little is required to dismantle them, one would never waste so much time building strategic defenses against the insults of life.”
– Alessandro Baricco, The Young Bride
“When you left you forgot a pack of cigarettes on the bed, half empty. I carried them around for months. Every so often I smoked one. Then they were gone.”
Alessandro Baricco, The Young Bride
“His features were free of any thought, and he breathed slowly, in the pure exercise of a necessity of life, free of hidden purposes or ulterior motives.”
– Alessandro Baricco, The Young Bride
“It named things without seeking elegance or precision, but restoring everything to the simplicity that we imagine facts have, when we haven’t had the privilege of studying them… It was a short letter.”
– Alessandro Baricco, The Young Bride
“…making love is an endless attempt to find a position in which to merge with the other, a position that doesn’t exist, but looking for it exists, and knowing how to look is an art.”
– Alessandro Baricco, The Young Bride
“She explained that one needn’t be afraid to talk, making love, because the voice we have when we make love is what is most secret in us and the words we’re capable of the only shocking, final, total nudity available to us.”
– Alessandro Baricco, The Young Bride
“the more proper sense of what we can do has always seemed to me to be to put between our life and what we write a magnificent distance that, produced first by the imagination, then filled in by craft and dedication, carries us to a place where worlds, nonexistent before, appear: worlds in which what is intimately ours, unmentionably ours, returns to existence, but almost unknown to us, and touched by the grace of the most delicate forms, like fossils or butterflies.”
– Alessandro Baricco, The Young Bride
“He left, taking the first steps backward and then turning around as if a gust of wind, and not a disrespectful choice, had decided for him—a technique of which he was a peerless master.”
– Alessandro Baricco, The Young Bride
“Life already has everything, provided you listen to it, and books are a useless distraction from that task, which this entire family attends to with such dedication that a man engaged in reading, in these rooms, would necessarily seem a deserter.”
– Alessandro Baricco, The Young Bride
“But they were like that: they ignored the passing of the days, because they aimed at living only a single, perfect day, infinitely repeated: so time for them was a phenomenon with variable margins that echoed in their lives like a foreign language.”
– Alessandro Baricco, The Young Bride
“If memory disorder provides a compelling analogy for the glitches in capitalist realism, the model for its smooth functioning would be dreamwork.”
– Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism
“What we now begin to feel, therefore … is henceforth, where everything now submits to the perpetual change of fashion and media image, that nothing can change any longer.”
– Fredric Jameson, “Antimonies Of The Postmodern”
“What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”
– T. S. Eliot
“Everything is so nicely laid to my hand. The office I find very burdensome and often unbearable, but at bottom, all the same, easy. In this easy way I earn more than I need. What for? Whom for? I shall go up in the scale of salaries. To what purpose?”
– Franz Kafka
“The tremendous world I have in my head! But how can I release it and release myself without tearing myself apart? And it is a thousand times better to tear myself apart than to keep it in check or buried in me. That is what I am here for, of that I am quite clear.”
– Franz Kafka