Marzie

“A man matters, his experiences matter, but in a city, where experiences come by the thousands, we can no longer relate them to ourselves, and this is of course the beginning of life’s notorious turning into abstraction.“

„There is always something ghostly about living constantly in a well-ordered state. You cannot step into the street or drink a glass of water or get on a streetcar without touching the balanced lever of gigantic apparatus of laws and interrelations, setting them in motion or letting them maintain you in your peaceful existence; one knows hardly any of these levers, which reach deep into the inner workings and, coming out of the other side, lose themselves in a network whose structure has never yet been unraveled by anyone. So one denies their existence, just as the average citizen denies the air, maintaining that it is empty space. But all these things that one denied, these colorless, odorless,tasteless, weightless, and morally indefinable things such as water, air, space, money, and the passing of time, turn out in truth to be the most important things of all, and this gives life a certain spooky quality.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

“هیچ شکنجه ای برای یک لحظه تحمل ناپذیر نیست. اگر فقط اقتدار لحظه می بود و بس، اگر "همین حالا" بود، اگر فقط "همین حالا" چه رازها که در دل خاک مدفون نمی شد. اگر فقط "همین حالا" بود و نه بعد، هیچ کس جلاد دیگری نبود. ... این گذشته است که شب می خزد زیر شمدت. پشت می کنی می بینی روبروی توست. سر در بالش فرو می کنی می بینی میان بالش توست. مثل سایه است و از آن بدتر. سایه، نور که نباشد، دیگر نیست. اما "گذشته" در خموشی و ظلمت با توست ... ”
― رضا قاسمی, همنوایی شبانه ارکستر چوبها

“Here I had a strange idea not unworthy of de Selby. Why was Joe so disturbed at the suggestion that he had a body? What if he had a body? A body with another body inside it in turn, thousands of such bodies within each other like the skins of an onion, receding to some unimaginable ultimum? Was I in turn merely a link in a vast sequence of imponderable beings, the world I knew merely the interior of the being whose inner voice I myself was? Who or what was the core and what monster in what world was the final uncontained colossus? God? Nothing? Was I receiving these wild thoughts from Lower Down or were they brewing newly in me to be transmitted Higher Up?”
― Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman

“What would happen if you did just shut a door and stop speaking? Hour after hour after hour of no words. Would you speak to yourself? Would words just stop being useful? Would you lose language altogether? Or would words mean more, would they start to mean in every direction, all somersault and assault, like a thuggery of fireworks? Would they proliferate, like untended plantlife? Would the inside of your head overgrow with every word that has ever come into it, every word that has ever silently taken seed or fallen dormant? Would your own silence make other things noisier? Would all the things you’d ever forgotten, all layered there inside you, come bouldering up and avalanche you?”
― Ali Smith, There But For The