Jeff Reiter

“Art has no meaning if it’s not an escape. If it’s not born of a prisoner’s despair. I can’t respect any art that comforts and relieves, those novels and music and paintings designed to make your prison more bearable.”
― Mircea Cărtărescu, Solenoid

“I’ve begun to see something that resembles coherence in the charade of my life.”
― Cotter Sean, Solenoid

“We are like people drawn inside of a square on a piece of paper. We cannot get out of the black lines, we exhaust ourselves by examining every part of the square, hoping to find a fissure. Until one of us suddenly understands, because he was predestined to understand, that within the plane of the paper escape is impossible. That the exit, simple and open wide, is perpendicular to the paper, in a third dimension that up until that moment was inconceivable.”
― Mircea Cărtărescu, Solenoid

“In fact, prayer and certainty are the same thing; both mean the power to truly see into the future, the true future, not the image of the eternal return of the past: no one prays for the sun to come up tomorrow. Through belief, we see the future and already inhabit it.”
― Mircea Cărtărescu, Solenoid