utter pivner

“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“It's just incredible. It just does not explain. Or perhaps that's it: they don't explain and we are not supposed to know. We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales, we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames out of some now incomprehensible affection which sound to us like Sanskrit or Chocktaw; we see dimly people, the people in whose living blood and seed we ourselves lay dormant and waiting, in this shadowy attenuation of time possessing now heroic proportions, performing their acts of simple passion and simple violence, impervious to time and inexplicable - Yes, Judith, Bon, Henry, Sutpen: all of them. They are there, yet something is missing; they are like a chemical formula exhumed along with the letters from that forgotten chest, carefully, the paper old and faded and falling to pieces, the writing faded, almost indecipherable, yet meaningful, familiar in shape and sense, the name and presence of volatile and sentient forces; you bring them together in the proportions called for, but nothing happens; you re-read, tedious and intent, poring, making sure that you have forgotten nothing, made no miscalculation; you bring them together again and again nothing happens: just the words, the symbols, the shapes themselves, shadowy inscrutable and serene, against that turgid background of a horrible and bloody mischancing of human affairs.”
― William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

“Decisions are never really made—at best they manage to emerge, from a chaos of peeves, whims, hallucinations and all-round assholery.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

“But Gwyon had hardly got the words out of his mouth before his upraised arm was grasped into the dark so heavily that it almost pulled him over; and the lightning followed so fast on the words that followed, that both were gone, and the transformation was complete, when Gwyon heard,
—Father... Am I the man for whom Christ died?”
― William Gaddis, The Recognitions