“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
“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
“I am in such a bad way that I think I can only get over it by not speaking to anyone for a week, or as long as may be necessary. From the fact that you won’t try to answer this postcard in any way, I shall see that you are fond of me.”
– Franz Kafka
“It is late. I should like you to know that I wished you a very good night tonight.”
– Franz Kafka
“Forgive me for yesterday evening, please! I shall come to your place at five o’clock. My excuse will be a little comic, so you are quite sure to believe it.”
– Franz Kafka
“When one is at school, friendship comes of itself, but afterwards it must be won, fought for indeed, and finally even this becomes impossible. That is the law of the world of men.”
– Max Brod, The Kingdom of Love
“I shall never grow up to be a man, from being a child I shall immediately become a white-haired ancient.”
– Franz Kafka
“Whatever you may say, a mother can do wonders. She puts together again what we have wrecked. I lost her when I was a child.”
– Franz Kafka, “The Married Couple”
“J’ai beaucoup pensé à votre travail ces jours derniers et j’ai compris l’inutilité de tout ce que je vous avais dit.”
– Samuel Beckett
“Il y a, dit-on, plusieurs genres de mélancolie. Les uns jettent des pierres, les autres écrivent des livres. Ecrire pour celui-ci est le commencement de la folie, pour celui-là c’en est la fin.”
– Samuel Beckett
“Ramener le silence, c’est le rôle des objets”
– Samuel Beckett