Alison Brady

“What man is is perhaps too much to be borne by man.”
― Richard Wright, The Outsider

“The value of a human being, Nietzsche said, does not lie in his usefulness: for it would continue to exist even if there were nobody to whom he could be useful.”
― Walter Kaufmann, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre

“Let us venture our readings as we venture a footstep, in the affectionate knowledge that we bring to our reading something of our task of existence, the methods and forms that make up our way of life, in the nuance of an ordinary, but always reinvented gesture.”
― Marielle Macé, Façons de lire, manières d'être

“It is small white, oval, scored tablets.

It doesn't create or transform; it interprets. It renders fleeting what was definitive; it renders contingent what was ineluctable. It supplies a new interpretation of life - less rich, less artificial, and marked by a certain rigidity. It provides no form of happiness, or even real relief; it's action is of a different kind: by transforming life into a sequence of formalities it allows you to fool yourself. On this basis, it helps people to live, or at least to not die - for a certain period of time.”
― Houellebecq