Gabriel > Gabriel's Quotes

“To philosophize is only another way of being afraid and leads hardly anywhere but to cowardly make-believe.”
― Luis Ferdinand Celine

“All that I am hangs by a thread tonight”
― Anna Akhmatova, The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova

“We're just like you,' the other tiger said. 'We speak the same language you do. We think the same thought. But we're tigers.'
'You could help me with arithmetic,' I said.
'What's that?' one of the tigers said.
'My arithmetic.'
'Oh, your arithmetic.'
'Yeah.'
'What do you want to know?' one of the tigers said.
'What's nine times nine?'
'Eighty-one,' a tiger said.
'What's eight times eight?'
'Fifty-six,' a tiger said.
I asked them half of dozen other questions: six times six, seven times four, etc. I was having a lot of trouble with arithmetic. Finally the tigers got bored with my questions and told me to go away.
'OK,' I said. 'I'll go outside.'
'Don't go too far,' one of the tigers said. 'We don't want anyone to come up here and kill us.'
'OK.'
They both went back to eating my parents. I went outside and sat down by the river. 'I'm an orphan,' I said.”
― Richard Brautigan, In Watermelon Sugar

“The only conclusion he could draw was that without points of reference, a man melts away.”
― Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles

“The terrible predicament of a beautiful girl is that only an experienced womanizer, someone cynical and without scruple, feels up to the challenge. More often than not, she will lose her virginity to some filthy lowlife in what proves to be the first step in an irrevocable decline.”
― Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles

“It is interesting to note that the "sexual revolution" was sometimes portrayed as a communal utopia, whereas in fact it was simply another stage in the historical rise of individualism. As the lovely word "household" suggests, the couple and the family would be the last bastion of primitive communism in liberal society. The sexual revolution was to destroy these intermediary communities, the last to separate the individual from the market. The destruction continues to this day.”
― Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles

“Back in Paris they had happy moments together, like stills from a perfume ad (dashing hand in hand down the steps of Montmartre; or suddenly revealed in motionless embrace on the Pont des Arts by the lights of a bateau-mouche as it turned). There were the Sunday afternoon half-arguments, too, the moments of silence when bodies curl up beneath the sheets on the long shores of silence and apathy where life founders. Annabelle's studio was so dark they had to turn on the lights at four in the afternoon. They sometimes were sad, but mostly they were serious. Both of them knew that this would be their last human relationship, and this feeling lacerated every moment they spent together. They had a great respect and a profound sympathy for each other, and there were days when, caught up in some sudden magic, they knew moments of fresh air and glorious, bracing sunshine. For the most part, however, they could feel a gray shadow moving over them, on the earth that supported them, and in everything they could glimpse the end.”
― Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles

“The metaphysical mutation that gave rise to materialism and modern science in turn spawned two great trends: rationalism and individualism. Huxley’s mistake was in having poorly evaluated the balance of power between these two. Specifically, he underestimated the growth of individualism brought about by an increased consciousness of death. Individualism gives rise to freedom, the sense of self, the need to distinguish oneself and to be superior to others. A rational society like the one he describes in Brave New World can defuse the struggle. Economic rivalry—a metaphor for mastery over space—has no more reason to exist in a society of plenty, where the economy is strictly regulated. Sexual rivalry—a metaphor for mastery over time through reproduction—has no more reason to exist in a society where the connection between sex and procreation has been broken. But Huxley forgets about individualism. He doesn’t understand that sex, even stripped of its link with reproduction, still exists—not as a pleasure principle, but as a form of narcissistic differentiation. The same is true of the desire for wealth. Why has the Swedish model of social democracy never triumphed over liberalism? Why has it never been applied to sexual satisfaction? Because the metaphysical mutation brought about by modern science leads to individuation, vanity, malice and desire. Any philosopher, not just Buddhist or Christian, but any philosopher worthy of the name, knows that, in itself, desire—unlike pleasure—is a source of suffering, pain and hatred.”
― Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles

“The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation. There must be something in family life that generates factual error. Over-closeness, the noise and heat of being. Perhaps even something deeper like the need to survive. Murray says we are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts. Facts threaten our happiness and security. The deeper we delve into things, the looser our structure may seem to become. The family process works towards sealing off the world. Small errors grow heads, fictions proliferate. I tell Murray that ignorance and confusion can’t possibly be the driving forces behind family solidarity. What an idea, what a subversion. He asks me why the strongest family units exist in the least developed societies. Not to know is a weapon of survival, he says. Magic and superstition become entrenched as the powerful orthodoxy of the clan. The family is strongest where objective reality is most likely to be misinterpreted. What a heartless theory, I say. But Murray insists it’s true.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“He'd once told me that the art of getting ahead in New York was based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way. The air was full of rage and complaint. People had no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them with it.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“Do you know that I love now to recall and visit at certain dates the places where I was once happy in my own way? I love to build up my present in harmony with the irrevocable past, and I often wander like a shadow, aimless, sad, and dejected, about the streets and crooked lanes of Petersburg.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Oh, if only you knew how often I have been in love in that way...."
"How? With whom?..."
"Why, with no one, with an ideal, with the one I dream of in my sleep. I make up regular romances in my dreams" (White Nights 14)”
― Fydor Dostoevsky

“I tell you what, I can't help coming here tomorrow, I am a dreamer; I have so little real life that I look upon such moments as this now, as so rare, that I cannot help going over such moments again in my dreams. I shall be dreaming of you all night, a whole week, a whole year. I shall certainly come here tomorrow, just here to this place, just as the same hour, and I shall be happy remembering today.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

“Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too,’ the absent presence of desire comes alive. But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can.”
― Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

“May the days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do not advance the action according to a plan.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“I'll tell you about it because I am here and you are distant.”
― Richard Brautigan, In Watermelon Sugar

“As her fate, she accepted the world of ice, shining, shimmering, dead; she resigned herself to the triumph of glaciers and the death of the world.”
― Anna Kavan, Ice

“Reality had always been something of an unknown quantity to me.”
― Anna Kavan, Ice

“I had a curious feeling that I was living on several planes simultaneously; the overlapping of these planes was confusing.”
― Anna Kavan, Ice

“Something in her demanded victimization and terror, so she corrupted my dreams, led me into dark places I had no wish to explore. It was no longer clear to me which of us was the victim. Perhaps we were victims of one another.”
― Anna Kavan, Ice

“She herself did not seem quite real. She was pale and almost transparent, the victim I used for my own enjoyment in dreams.”
― Anna Kavan, Ice

“It is not easy to describe my mother. Remote and starry, her sad stranger’s grace did not concern the landscape of the day. Should I say that she was beautiful or that she did not love me? Have shadows beauty? Does the night love her child?”
― Anna Kavan, Sleep Has His House

“Too little love, too little justice and mercy, and always too little love; all too much hardness, arrogance, and all manner of criminality - that's me.
I'm certain I only avoid evil out of weakness and cowardice and so further shame my wickedness. I long for the day when the soul shall cease to wish or be able to live in this wretched body polluted with melancholy, when it shall quit this laughable form made of muck and rottenness, which is all too faithful a reflection of a godless, cursed century.”
― Georg Trakl, Poems and Prose

“Returning home
The shepherds found the sweet body
Decayed in the thorn-bush.

I am a shadow far from sombre villages.
God's silence I drank from the spring in the grove.

Cold metal enters upon my brow,
Spiders seek out my heart.
There is a light that goes out in my mouth.

At night I found myself on a heath,
Stiff with refuse and dust of stars.
In the hazel-bush
Crystalline angels sounded again.”
― Georg Trakl, Poems and Prose

“Sight isolates, sound incorporates. Whereas sight situates the observer outside what he views, at a distance, sound pours into the hearer. Vision dissects, as Merleau-Ponty has observed (1961). Vision comes to a human being from one direction at a time: to look at a room or a landscape, I must move my eyes around from one part to another. When I hear, however, I gather sound simultaneously from every directions at once; I am at the center of my auditory world, which envelopes me, establishing me at a kind of core of sensation and existence... You can immerse yourself in hearing, in sound. There is no way to immerse yourself similarly in sight.
By contrast with vision, the dissecting sense, sound is thus a unifying sense. A typical visual ideal is clarity and distinctness, a taking apart. The auditory ideal, by contrast, is harmony, a putting together.
Interiority and harmony are characteristics of human consciousness. The consciousness of each human person is totally interiorized, known to the person from the inside and inaccessible to any other person directly from the inside. Everyone who says 'I' means something different by it from what every other person means. What is 'I' to me is only 'you' to you...
In a primary oral culture, where the word has its existence only in sound... the phenomenology of sound enters deeply into human beings' feel for existence, as processed by the spoken word. For the way in which the word is experienced is always momentous in psychic life.”
― Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word

“Print encourages a sense of closure, a sense that what is found in a text has been finalized, has reached a state of completion.”
― Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy

“Many of the features we have taken for granted in thought and expression in literature, philosophy and science, and even in oral discourse among literates, are not directly native to human existence as such but have come into being because of the resources which the technology of writing makes available to human consciousness.”
― Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word

“The stars are so big,
The Earth is so small,
Stay as you are.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects

“There's nothing in this warm, vegetal dusk that is not beautiful or that will last.”
― Joe Bolton, The Last Nostalgia: Poems 1982-1990

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye