Monster Okay

“Public interference with poetry rests on the popular delusion that an immediate commerce exists between historical truth and poetic truth; that the historical universe is potentially the poetic universe. The historical universe is, however, only a temporary aggregate of ideas. These ideas may direct the structure of the literary universe, which produces the philosophical journalism of a period; the structure of the poetic universe is directed by a person in single-handed conflict with the time-community. Science, the present-day aggregate of tribal ideas, puts on the creative mind a social compulsion to accept these ideas; and criticism acts, as usual, as the nattered instrument of conversion. Official literature is born of a critical rather than of a literary sense; it is the social institution which the [professionalized] poet is hired to serve.”
― Laura Riding, Contemporaries and Snobs

“The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are "status quo" is the catastrophe. It is not an ever-present possibility but
what in each case is given. Thus hell is not
something that awaits us, but this life here and now.”
― Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

“Now and again in these parts you come across people so remarkable that, no matter how much time has passed since you met them, it is impossible to recall them without your heart trembling.”
― Nikolai Leskov, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk

“To tell about him, one should be French, because only the people of that nation manage to explain to others what they don’t understand themselves.”
― Николай Лесков, The Enchanted Wanderer: and Other Stories