Imre Bertelsen

“Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do,' Arkadian Porpirych says. 'What statistic allows one to identify the nations where literature enjoys true consideration better than the sums appropriated for controlling it and suppressing it? Where it is the object of such attentions, literature gains an extraordinary authority, inconceivable in countries where it is allowed to vegetate as an innocuous pastime, without risks.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives