Milena > Milena's Quotes

“INELUCTABLE MODALITY OF THE VISIBLE: AT LEAST THAT IF NO MORE, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.


Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o'er his base, fell through the nebeneinander ineluctably. I am getting on nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap with it: they do. My two feet in his boots are at the end of his legs, nebeneinander. Sounds solid: made by the mallet of Los Demiurgos. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush, crack, crick, crick. Wild sea money. Dominie Deasy kens them a'.

Won't you come to Sandymount,
Madeline the mare?

Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. A catalectic tetrameter of iambs marching. No, agallop: deline the mare.

Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. Basta! I will see if I can see.

See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Crooked Warden,” said Locke, “men are stupid. Protect us from ourselves. If you can’t, let it be quick and painless.”
― Scott Lynch, Red Seas Under Red Skies

“What a stupid, reckless, idiotic, ridiculous damn thing to do! I haven't the words to express my admiration.”
― Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora

“You write?” “Why, all the time,” said Locke, “except of course when I’m wrong.”
― Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora

“I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“People understand me so poorly that they don't even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Journals of Kierkegaard

“I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away — yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth's orbit ——————————— and wanted to shoot myself.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“My sorrow is my castle.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“»Aber weißt du, was besser ist? Noch besser als friedlich sterben?«

»Sag es mir.«

»Nicht sterben, kleine Liz. Das ist viel besser.«”
― Daniel Kehlmann, Tyll

“I'm sick of everything, and of the everythingness of everything.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Wehe, Sie lesen eindringlicher, Sie ruinieren sich alles, was Sie lesen. Es ist ganz gleich, was Sie lesen, es wird am Ende lächerlich und ist am Ende nichts wert. Hüten Sie sich vor dem Eindringen in Kunstwerke, sagte er, Sie verderben sich alles und jedes, selbst das Geliebteste.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Old Masters: A Comedy

“We're constantly correcting, and correcting ourselves, most rigorously , because we recognize at every moment that we did it all wrong, how we acted all wrong, that everything to this point in time is a falsification, so we correct this falsification, and then we again correct the correction of this falsification and we correct the result of the correction of a correction and so forth, so Roithamer. But the ultimate correction is one we keep delaying, the kind others have made without ado from one minute to the next, I think, so Roithamer, the kind they could, by the time they no longer thought about it, because they were afraid even to think about it, but then they did correct themselves, like my cousin, like his father, my uncle, like all the others whom we knew, as we thought, whom we knew so thoroughly, yet we didn't really know all these peoples' characters, because their self-correction took us by surprise, otherwise we wouldn't have been surprised by their ultimate existential correction, their suicide.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Correction

“I know nothing about nature. I hate nature, because it is killing me.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Wittgenstein’s Nephew

“The only advice i can offer to any thinking person is to kill himself before the millennium”
― Thomas Bernhard, Extinction

“Now, with God's help, I shall become myself.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“I’ve never known fear; as a youth I fought/ In endless battles. I am old, now,/ But I will fight again, seek fame still,/ If the dragon hiding in his tower dares/ To face me”
― Burton Raffel, Beowulf

“Fate goes ever as fate must.”
― Seamus Heaney, Beowulf

“How can I keep silent? How can I stay quiet?
My friend, whom I loved, has turned to clay,
my friend Enkidu, whom I loved has turned to clay.
Shall I not be like him, and also lie down,
never to rise again, through all eternity?”
― Anonymous, The Epic of Gilgamesh

“As for man, his days are numbered, whatever he might do, it is but wind.”
― Andrew George, The Epic of Gilgamesh

“Gilgamesh said to him, to Utnapishtim the remote,
"What can I do, Utnapishtim? Where can I go?
A thief has stolen my flesh.
Death lives in the house where my bed is,
and wherever I set my feet, there Death is.”
― John Gardner, Gilgamesh

“Someday, Locke Lamora,” he said, “someday, you’re going to fuck up so magnificently, so ambitiously, so overwhelmingly that the sky will light up and the moons will spin and the gods themselves will shit comets with glee. And I just hope I’m still around to see it.”
“Oh please,” said Locke. “It’ll never happen.”
― Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora

“I don't have to beat you. I don't have to beat you, motherfucker. I just have to keep you here... until Jean shows up.”
― Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora

“To us — richer and cleverer than everyone else!”
― Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora

“Good. Well. Shit." Locke rubbed his gloved hands together. "I guess that's that. I'm all out of rhetorical flourishes.”
― Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora

“If he had a bloody gash across his throat and a physiker was trying to sew it up, Lamora would steal the needle and thread and die laughing.”
― Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora