Mr. James

“We may come, touch and go, from atoms and ifs but we're presurely destined to be odd's without ends.”
― James Joyce

“You are right in demand­ing that an artist should take an intel­li­gent atti­tude to his work, but you con­fuse two things: solv­ing a prob­lem and stat­ing a prob­lem cor­rectly. It is only the sec­ond that is oblig­a­tory for the artist.”
― Anton Chekhov, A Life in Letters

“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