Jessica

“[On Du Bois] Celebrated Negro scholar and organizer. 70 years old, but looks 50. Dusky face, grizzled goatee, nice wrinkles, big ears — prodigiously like a White Russian General in mufti played sympathetically by Emil Jannings. Piebald hands. Brilliant talker, with an old-world touch. Très gentilhomme. Smokes special Turkish cigarettes. Charming and distinguished in other, more important, ways. Told me that when he went to England he was listed as “Colonel” on the Channel boat, because his name bore the addition “Col.” on his passport.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940-1971

“I don't want to earn my living, I want to live.”
― Oscar Wilde

“There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy.”
― Gillian Rose, Love's Work: A Reckoning with Life

“He always finds himself face to face with the incomprehensible, inaccessible, the "language of the stone". And his only recourse is talking. This cannot be "literature". Literature belongs to those who are at home in the world. He can only talk in a simple--deceptively simple--way: circular, repetitive, insisting on the very gap between him and the world, between him and nature. He can only hope that out of his insistence will come a new language which can fill the gap and include the other side.”
― Rosemarie Waldrop, Collected Prose