Jack Caulfield

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Jack is Currently Reading

Jack Caulfield is currently reading

Bleak House

by Charles Dickens

bookshelves: currently-reading, 19c, novel

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Jan 02, 2026 02:35AM

“There may be a logical or historical reason why mid-Victorian English butchers should have been predominantly Conservative (a link with agriculture?) and grocers overwhelmingly Liberal (a link with overseas trade?), but none has been established, and perhaps what needs explaining is not this, but why these two omnipresent types of shopkeeper refused to share the same opinions, whatever they were.”
― Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848–1875

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“The stupidity/pleasure axis I apply to popular artists: how much pleasure they give versus how stupid one has to become to receive said pleasure.”
― Zadie Smith, Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays

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“No,' said the priest, 'we must not accept everything is true, we must only accept it is necessary.'

'A dismal thought,' said K., 'it makes untruth into a universal principle.”
― Franz Kafka, The Trial

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“Why do you have to go to the cathedral?' said Leni. K. tried to explain briefly, but he had hardly begun when Leni suddenly said: 'They are hounding you.' K., who could not bear anyone feeling sorry for him unexpectedly or gratuitously, broke off abruptly with just two words; but as he hung up the receiver he said, half to himself and half to the distant woman who could no longer hear him: 'Yes, they are hounding me.”
― Franz Kafka, The Trial

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“An elderly merchant, a man with a long beard, was pleading with a young girl for a favourable report! Whatever Block's ulterior motive might be, nothing could justify his behaviour in the eyes of a fellow human being.
K. did not understand how the advocate could have imagined that this spectacle would win him over. If K. had not dismissed him already, this performance would have made him do so; it almost degraded the onlooker. So this was the effect of the advocate's method, to which K. had fortunately not been exposed for too long: the client finally forgot the whole world and could only drag himself along this illusory path to the end of his trial. He was no longer a client; he was the advocate's dog.”
― Franz Kafka, The Trial

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