Mr. James

“He asked me several things, but I couldn't answer, indeed I didn't even understand his questions. So I said: "Perhaps you are sorry now that you invited me, so I'd better go," and I was about to get up. But he stretched his hand out over the table and pressed me down. "Stay," he said, "that was only a test. He who does not answer the questions has passed the test.”
― 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

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

“For instance, supposing that the planet earth were not a sphere but a gigantic coffee table, how much difference in everyday life would that make?”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World