Katia N

“What Beckett is dramatising here is a quite different view of the notion that man is the storytelling animal. What he is showing is that we may indeed have an innate capacity to tell stories, but that far from this being the royal road to truth it is simply a way of avoiding the truth, of avoiding the sense that something nameless is taking its course, that our lives are passing us by, that we are moving inexorably towards a death we do not understand or want and certainly do not know how to cope with.

But what does that do to the feeling that something nameless is taking its course, something that needs to be dealt with that otherwise will drive him mad? This, it seems to me, is the paradox that lies at the heart of all modern art: the need to speak of that which cannot be uttered, together with the recognition that the utterance perverts or destroys the thing that needed to be spoken of.”
― Gabriel Josipovici, The Teller and the Tale: Essays on Literature and Culture

“Стає темно. Потім знов блискавка і видно, як ті - ж берестки з розмаху нахиляються до землі, мов бажаючи щось з неї підняти, й, не діставши, одкидаються назад, злісно, безсило тріпочуть кучерявими віттями й знов розхитуються... А старі дуби стоять, стогнуть і неначе з жалем і тугою хитають головами на силкування молодіжи. А там, на мосту, над головою, здається, злетілись дві величезні армії й скажено бʼються. Грюкіт гармат, тупотіння коней, несамовите ревіння, все мішається в страшенний, дужий концерт, де можна чути й шепотіння пекельної злости, й грюкіт гніву. А виття болю й ненависти, й страх, й дужий, радісний поклик до бою й повне одчаю й муки знесилля. Бій не змовкає й кров потоками дощу ллеться на ліс, прориває листя, стікає на бричку й починає капати за шию й на голову…”
― Volodymyr Vynnychenko, Контрасти

“In the U.S. election of 1860, the New York Herald's owner James Gordon Bennett Sr. warned the white workers of New York, "... if Lincoln is elected, you will have to compete with the labor of four million emancipated negroes.”
― Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

“The truth is that we never know from whom we originally get the ideas and beliefs that shape us, those that make a deep impression on us and which we adopt as a guide, those we retain without intending to and make our own.

From a great-grandparent, a grandparent, a parent, not necessarily ours? From a distant teacher we never knew and who taught the one we did know? From a mother, from a nursemaid who looked after her as a child? From the ex-husband of our beloved, from a ġe-bryd-guma we never met? From a few books we never read and from an age through which we never lived? Yes, it's incredible how much people say, how much they discuss and recount and write down, this is a wearisome world of ceaseless transmission, and thus we are born with the work already far advanced but condemned to the knowledge that nothing is ever entirely finished, and thus we carry-like a faint booming in our heads-the exhausting accumulated voices of the countless centuries, believing naively that some of those thoughts and stories are new, never before heard or read, but how could that be, when ever since they acquired the gift of speech people have never stopped endlessly telling stories and, sooner or later, everything is told, the interesting and the trivial, the private and the public, the intimate and the superfluous, what should remain hidden and what will one day inevitably be broadcast, sorrows and joys and resentments, certainties and conjectures, the imagined and the factual, persuasions and suspicions, grievances and flattery and plans for revenge, great feats and humiliations, what fills us with pride and what shames us utterly, what appeared to be a secret and what begged to remain so, the normal and the unconfessable and the horrific and the obvious, the substantial-falling in love-and the insignificant-falling in love. Without even giving it a second thought, we go and we tell.”
― Javier Marías, Poison, Shadow, and Farewell