Stephen Marotta

“What? We feel aesthetic pleasure at a sonata by Beethoven and not at one with the same style and charm if it comes from one of our own contemporaries? Isn't that the height of hypocrisy? So then the sensation of beauty is not spontaneous, spurred by our sensibility, but instead is cerebral, conditioned by our knowing a date?
No way around it: historical consciousness is so thoroughly inherent in our perception of art that this anachronism (a Beethoven piece written today) would be spontaneously (that is, without the least hypocrisy) felt to be ridiculous, false, incongruous, even monstrous. Our feeling for continuity is so strong that it enters into the perception of any work of art.”
― Milan Kundera, The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts

“Homer never wondered whether, after their many hand-to-hand struggles, Achilles or Ajax still had all their teeth.”
― Milan Kundera, The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts

“If there is one thing I dislike, it is the man who tries to air his grievances when I wish to air mine.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Love Among the Chickens

“An iceberg is water striving to be land; a mountain, especially a Himalaya, especially Everest, is land's attempt to metamorphose into sky; it is grounded in flight, the earth mutated--nearly--into air, and become, in the true sense, exalted. Long before she ever encountered the mountain, Allie was aware of its brooding presence in her soul.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses