Alex Merrett

“Men go through life telling themselves a moment must come when they will show what they're made of. And the moment comes, and they do show. And they spend the rest of their days explaining that was neither the moment nor the true self.”
― Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

“Cigarettes are the punctuation marks of life. Now I live without punctuation, without rhythm. My life is a stupid avant-garde poem.

I live without cigarettes to mark a question. Without cigarettes that end as we get happily or dangerously close to an answer. Or to the absence of one. Exclamation cigarettes. Ellipsis cigarettes. I would like to smoke with the elegance of a semicolon.”
― Alejandro Zambra, My Documents

“People fascinated by the idea of progress never suspect that every step forward is also a step on the way to the end and that behind all the joyous 'onward and upward' slogans lurks the lascivious voice of death urging us to make haste.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“But now I don't know any story, mine or anyone else's, that did not begin in the animal movement of a body - an inclination, a wound, an obliqueness, at times a brilliant move, often obscene instincts that came from far away. It's all written there already. The thoughts come afterward, and are always a belated map, to which, out of convention and weariness, we attribute some precision.”
― Alessandro Baricco, La Sposa giovane