Mr. James

“If I ever get reincarnated, it occurred to me, let me make certain I don't come back as a paperclip.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“Poseidon sat at his desk, doing figures. The administration of all the waters gave him endless work. [...] It cannot be said that he enjoyed his work; he did it only because it had been assigned to him; in fact, he had already filed many petitions for--as he put it--more cheerful work, but every time the offer of something different was made to him it turned out that nothing suited him quite as well as his present position.”
― Franz Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes

“And perhaps he had made no mistake at all, his name really was called, it having been the teacher's intention to make the rewarding of the best student at the same time a punishment for the worst one.”
― Franz Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes

“There is a confusion between myself and the literary world about what should constitute a text. I believe (along with many other writers historically) that a text should be elusive, and that the act of reading a text should make the reader conscious of the life they are living. That is, the text should overflow its borders, demonstrating the complicity of our consciousness with the coloring of our surroundings and the supposed sequentiality of events. To write texts this way, one must stop prior to the point of total explanation.”
― Jesse Ball, Autoportrait