Jack Caulfield

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Jack is Currently Reading

Jack Caulfield is currently reading

The Pale King

by David Foster Wallace

bookshelves: 20c, novel, currently-reading

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Jan 18, 2026 10:46AM

“Build peaks, and former highlands become flatlands--ordinary topography loses its allure. The attempt to make our lives not a waste, by seeking a few most remarkable incidents, will make the rest of our lives a waste. The concept of experience turns us into dwellers in a plateau village who hold on to a myth of the happier race of people who live on the peaks. We climb up occasionally, but only with preparation, for short expeditions. We can't stay there, and everyone is restless and unsatisfied at home.”
― Mark Greif, Against Everything: Essays

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“In lieu of loving the world twice as hard, I care, in the end, about expressing my obdurate singularity at any cost. I love this hard and unyielding part of myself more than any other reward the world has to offer a newly brightened and ingratiating demeanor, and I will bear any costs associated with it.”
― Wesley Yang, The Souls of Yellow Folk

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“Elle avait un perroquet, très joli, toutes les couleurs les plus appréciées. Je le comprenais mieux que sa maîtresse. Je ne veux pas dire que je le comprenais mieux qu'elle ne le comprenait, je veux dire que je le comprenais mieux que je ne la comprenais elle. Il disait de temps en temps, Putain de conasse de merde de chiaison. Il avait dû appartenir à une personne française avant d'appartenir à Lousse. Les animaux changent souvent de propriétaire. Il ne disait pas grand'chose d'autre. Si, il disait aussi, Fuck ! Ce n’était pourtant pas une personne française qui lui avait appris à dire, Fuck ! Peut-être qu'il l'avait trouvé tout seul, ça ne m'étonnerait pas. Lousse essayait de lui faire dire, Pretty Polly ! Je crois que c'était trop tard. Il écoutait, la tête de côté, réfléchissait, puis disait, Putain de conasse de merde de chiaison. On voyait qu'il faisait un effort.”
― Samuel Beckett, Molloy

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“Power has become so subtle and complex a thing in the ways taken by the Ekumen that only a subtle mind can watch it work; here it is still limited, still visible. In Estraven, for instance, one feels the man's power as an augmentation of his character; he cannot make an empty gesture or say a word that is not listened to. He knows it, and the knowledge gives him more reality than most people own: a solidness of being, a substantiality, a human grandeur. Nothing succeeds like success. I don't trust Estraven, whose motives are forever obscure; I don't like him; yet I feel and respond to his authority as surely as I do to the warmth of the sun.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

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“Thucydides wrote of people who made rules and followed them. Going by rule they killed entire classes of enemies without exception. Most of those who died felt, I am sure, that a terrible mistake was being made, that, whatever the rule was, it could not be meant for them. 'I--!': that was their last word as their throats were cut. A word of protest: I, the exception.

"Were they exceptions? The truth is, given time to speak, we would all claim to be exceptions. For each of us there is a case to be made. We all deserve the benefit of the doubt.

"But there are times when there is no time for all that close listening, all those exceptions, all that mercy. There is no time, so we fall back on the rule. And that is a great pity, the greatest pity. That is what you could have learned from Thucydides. It is a great pity when we find ourselves entering upon times like those. We should enter upon them with a sinking heart. They are by no means to be welcomed.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Age of Iron

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