Anna > Recent Status Updates

But this splitting-up of sacred remains into separate pieces corresponds perhaps to that other phenomenon of disintegration that takes place in the living bodies of the bereft: every loved one in passing away steals a little flesh, a little blood from those who remain on earth, shivering with cold and pointlessness in the continuous drizzle of absence.

Dreams are meant to become part of reality, forcing their way in with violence if necessary. They are meant to re-infuse it with energy, light, freshness, when it gets mired in mediocrity, ugliness and stupidity.

In that time, moral standards were high in public life and so, therefore, was hypocrisy.

art is about quality, not about liking or not liking it, not at all, and it's not about taste either

If this doesn't make the shortlist, I might stop following the Booker Prize. Not out of spite, but out of a severe distrust of my own ability to judge books.

we think that meekness means being ready to bear everything, but that is our pride speaking, our accountant's concept of justice and revenge; true meekness is where the contradiction is gone--bear it or not, put up with it or not, where there is an equal possibility of one or the other--but you do not raise your voice against God."

Lebedev is one of my most remarkable discoveries in months.

"The spirit of the times was fully realized in them: not the general & superficial one that is in the air and forms an era's ambience-fashion, slogans, speeches, technological innovations-but what is deeper and closer to the heart: the concepts of good and evil, the concepts of human and inhuman, the dominant note of relations, what one man can do to another-&the times will accept those deeds as a matter of course."

Philosophers have labeled melancholy a disease, claimed it is sadness without reason, yet I was certain it was the sadness of reason.

That's how a writer makes it on my auto-buy list.

The dark divests us of our qualities.

Time passed and my childhood grew thin and flat, paperlike. It was tired and threadbare, and in low moments it didn't look like it would last until I was grown up. ...
Unawares, my childhood falls silently to the bottom of my memory, that library of the soul from which I will draw knowledge and experience for the rest of my life.

"Publishing is senseless, if not an intellectual crime, or rather a capital offence against the intellect. ... To publish anything is folly and evidence of a certain defect of character."

So when does the gloomy-doomy Bernhardesque start? :) So far this book is hilarious.

"A rainbow is not the light."
Of course it isn't. It is dialogue with the light.

"What sees is seen."

Kraus has principles, he sits firmly in the saddle, he rides satisfaction, and that is a horse which people should not mount if they want to do some galloping.

There must be a verb in some language that means, to leave the lamps burning for someone who has not yet arrived.

"their bare paddling legs... must seem, to anyone mirroring
along the lake bed, rather like
lost roots
looking for soil"

"Fossil Finds His Voice in Her Cervix"

Maddie Mortimer must have falsified her birth certificate. It's unbelievable she wrote this book at around 25. Her artistic handling of cellular memory is fantastic.

"Everything that is worthy of man and characteristic to him has been accomplished through the liberated individual omni modo determinatum, and not through the workings of the dark patterns of collectivity."