Sign in with Facebook
“Even the poorest and most squalid life is an Aeschylean drama, if you think about the tragedy of the bodily functions, the whispering of the secretions, the silence of the organs, the exertions of memory, the groping of the voice, the blood that courses, the mortal miasmas, the riots among microorganisms, the spermatic wars, the cellular eruptions, the pestilences of the nerves, the biochemical predestinations, and the fate that slowly but surely introduces you to the final infection, to the sores, the exploded boils, the snakes of madness, the furious bitches of Hunger.”
― The Silence of the Body: Materials for the Study of Medicine
― The Silence of the Body: Materials for the Study of Medicine
“All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.”
― Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
― Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
“The routine produces. But each day, nevertheless, when you try to get started you have to transmogrify, transpose yourself; you have to go through some kind of change from being a normal human being, into becoming some kind of slave.
I simply don’t want to break through that membrane. I’d do anything to avoid it. You have to get there and you don’t want to go there because there’s so much pressure and so much strain and you just want to stay on the outside and be yourself. And so the day is a constant struggle to get going.
And if somebody says to me, You’re a prolific writer—it seems so odd. It’s like the difference between geological time and human time. On a certain scale, it does look like I do a lot. But that’s my day, all day long, sitting there wondering when I’m going to be able to get started. And the routine of doing this six days a week puts a little drop in a bucket each day, and that’s the key. Because if you put a drop in a bucket every day, after three hundred and sixty-five days, the bucket’s going to have some water in it.
http://is.gd/ouArv5”
―
I simply don’t want to break through that membrane. I’d do anything to avoid it. You have to get there and you don’t want to go there because there’s so much pressure and so much strain and you just want to stay on the outside and be yourself. And so the day is a constant struggle to get going.
And if somebody says to me, You’re a prolific writer—it seems so odd. It’s like the difference between geological time and human time. On a certain scale, it does look like I do a lot. But that’s my day, all day long, sitting there wondering when I’m going to be able to get started. And the routine of doing this six days a week puts a little drop in a bucket each day, and that’s the key. Because if you put a drop in a bucket every day, after three hundred and sixty-five days, the bucket’s going to have some water in it.
http://is.gd/ouArv5”
―
“I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained.”
―
―
“But I realized something. About art. And psychiatry. They're both self-perpetuating systems. Like religion. All three of them promise you a sense of inner worth and meaning, and spend a lot of time telling you about the suffering you have to go through to achieve it. As soon as you get a problem in any one of them, the solution it gives is always to go deeper into the same system. They're all in rather uneasy truce with one another in what's actually a mortal battle. Like all self-reinforcing systems. At best, each is trying to encompass the other two and define them as sub-groups. You know: religion and art are both forms of madness and madness is the realm of psychiatry. Or, art is the study and praise of man and man's ideals, so therefore a religious experience just becomes a brutalized aesthetic response and psychiatry is just another tool for the artist to observe man and render his portraits more accurately. And the religious attitude I guess is that the other two are only useful as long as they promote the good life. At worst, they all try to destroy one another. Which is what my psychiatrist, whether he knew it or not, was trying, quite effectively, to do to my painting. I gave up psychiatry too, pretty soon. I just didn't want to get all wound up in any systems at all.”
― Dhalgren
― Dhalgren
Goodreads Librarians Group
— 298524 members
— last activity 2 minutes ago
Goodreads Librarians are volunteers who help ensure the accuracy of information about books and authors in the Goodreads' catalog. The Goodreads Libra ...more
Corona/Samizdat
— 91 members
— last activity Oct 25, 2025 01:15PM
Born from the shambles of an unreliable and borderline criminal press, Rick Harsch decided to take his fate, or at least the fate of his books, into h ...more
Alexander Theroux Ville
— 117 members
— last activity Oct 11, 2025 05:58AM
The Theroux revival continues. This group counts as a village forum for discussing the works of Alexander Theroux. Both scholars and the naive and cur ...more
William T Vollmann Central
— 272 members
— last activity Jul 24, 2025 05:08AM
This corner of goodreads shall serve the needs of rainbow readers of Mr Vollmann's indulgent body of work. We welcome the veteran and the fresh flesh ...more
The Assassination of Olof Palme
— 25 members
— last activity Dec 16, 2020 10:19AM
THE ASSASSINATION OF OLOF PALME, a People’s Novel, is a zany anthological novel that includes the writing of at least 50 writers, including the conduc ...more
Marcus’s 2024 Year in Books
Take a look at Marcus’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
756 books
|
411 friends
1,493 books
|
314 friends
218 books
|
291 friends
2,510 books
|
4,999 friends
3,538 books
|
1,349 friends
562 books
|
45 friends
2,535 books
|
297 friends
743 books
|
96 friends
More friends…
Polls voted on by Marcus
Lists liked by Marcus
