Joseph Hirsch

“Although I had managed to escape from the goose-coop, I now realized the full extent of my misfortune, for I had shitted my trousers and did not know what to do about it.”
― Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, Simplicissimus

“The ruin of his hopes leaves the steadfast man undismayed.”
― Ernst Jünger

“I would be perfectly willing if a publisher came up to me and said, "I need a novel about underwater Nazi cheerleaders and it has to be 309 pages long and I need fourteen chapters and a prologue.”
― Michael McDowell

“That was the great misconception about men: because they dealt with money, because they could hire someone on and later fire him, because they alone filled state assemblies and were elected congressional representatives, everyone thought they had power. Yet all the hiring and firing, the land deals and the lumber contracts, the complicated process for putting through a constitutional amendment-these were only bluster. They were blinds to disguise the fact of men's real powerlessness in life. Men controlled the legislatures, but when it came down to it, they didn't control themselves. Men had failed to study their own minds sufficiently, and because of this failure they were at the mercy of fleeting passions; men, much more than women, were moved by petty jealousies and the desire for petty revenges. Because they enjoyed their enormous but superficial power, men had never been forced to know themselves the way that women, in their adversity and superficial subservience, had been forced to learn about the workings of their brains and their emotions.”
― Michael McDowell, The Flood