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His wife believed that over many years of working as an editor in a publishing house, he’d come to confuse realism with reality. It was her opinion that he was looking to life for the satisfactions provided by novels: the possibility of redemption, answers and patterns, motive and cause [...] Life was random and cruel, she said, and she’d lost patience with his unwillingness to face that fact.

Kerry Negara, an Australian living in Bali, made a documentary called A Loving Friend about the artist’s Sanur domain. Released in 2009, it can now be viewed online. It includes interviews with four middle-aged Balinese men who knew Friend or belonged to his household. https://youtu.be/5ArLFmOTFlQ?si=_3aGd...

"Obviously the occasion called for mauling our mothers. As daughters, it was our duty and our fate to disappoint [[our mothers]], we agreed, and we swore we’d go on doing so. We howled and howled, and tears ran down our cheeks. Etsuko played keyboards in Says Ann. She was ripping up and howling too, but then she broke off. She asked, ‘Does anyone want to end up like her father instead?’"

"Obviously the occasion called for mauling our mothers. As daughters, it was our duty and our fate to disappoint [[our mothers]], we agreed, and we swore we’d go on doing so. We howled and howled, and tears ran down our cheeks. Etsuko played keyboards in Says Ann. She was ripping up and howling too, but then she broke off. She asked, ‘Does anyone want to end up like her father instead?’"

‘Everything French was an affront to the English department,’ I explained. ‘And the French department’s Contemporary Theory unit was taught by a guy who specialised in Sade. At the start of my honours year, he was identified as the campus rapist and arrested. I’m pretty sure the unit’s still on hold.’ ‘Sydney is so backward,’ Lenny said with Melbourne glee.

"As I recalled thrashing about in the messy gap between [[theory and practice]], I began to see that my novel had stalled because it wasn’t the book I needed to write. The book I needed to write concerned breakdowns between theory and practice, and the material was overwhelming. Particles of it had entered my novel and jammed up its works."

"[Sontag] doesn't only argue with Woolf. She argues with herself, rejecting her earlier argument in her landmark book On Photography that we grow deadened to images of atrocity and speculating on how we must continue to look. Because the atrocities don't end and somehow we must engage with them."

"[Sontag] doesn't only argue with Woolf. She argues with herself, rejecting her earlier argument in her landmark book On Photography that we grow deadened to images of atrocity and speculating on how we must continue to look. Because the atrocities don't end and somehow we must engage with them."

"She thinks of what must be discarded and stolen from the animal in order to make it useful to a glove-maker: the heart, the bones, the soul, the spirit, the blood, the viscera. A glover will only ever want the skin, the surface, the outer layer. Everything else is useless, an inconvenience, an unnecessary mess. She thinks of the private cruelty behind something as beautiful and perfect as a glove."

All this happened so long ago. And I never returned, never wrote, never met anyone who might have given me news of Oxgodby. So, in memory, it stays as I left it, a sealed room furnished by the past, airless, still, ink long dry on a put-down pen. But this was something I knew nothing of as I lifted the loop and set off across the meadow.

Standing up there on the platform before a great work of art, feeling kinship with its creator, cosily knowing that I was a sort of impresario conjuring and teasing back his work after four hundred years of darkness. But that wasn't all of it. There was this weather, this landscape, thick woods, roadsides deep in grass and wild flowers. And to south and north of the Vale, low hills, frontiers of a mysterious country.

But mercifully it wasn't Baghdad, so he couldn't drape her in a yasmak and other men could still cast an admiring eye on his doe-eyed bride.

In large numbers everything gets much too threatened, a quantity needs to remain something abstract, has to be the postulate of a theory, has to remain operable, it has to have the purity of mathematics, only mathematics allows billions to be beautiful, a billion apples, on the other hand, is unpalatable, a ton of coffee in itself testifies to countless crimes, a billion people is inconceivably depraved, pitiful [..]

sitting in their countries, they’re the ones who are behind the times, because they lack a language, for always, in all ages, those without a language rule. I will tell you a terrible secret: language is punishment. Language must encompass all things and in it all things must again transpire according to guilt and the degree of guilt. (Signs of exhaustion in Herr Mühlbauer. Signs of my own exhaustion.)

[....] but when you’re drinking coffee with me or when we’re drinking wine and playing chess, then where are all the wars and where is humanity starving to death, and are you really sorry about all that or just sorry about the fact that you’re losing, or because I’m about to be so hungry I could eat a horse and why are you laughing right now, does humanity have a lot to laugh about right this minute?

"This little piece of side street is my greatest security, during the day I run up the stairs, at night I fall upon the outside door armed with the key, and once again that blissful moment returns, when the key twists, the locks unlock, the doors open and that feeling of having come home overwhelms me in the spray of traffic and people."

"Meanwhile I did everything to help the transition—lent him money to ease his conscience, introduced him to pretty women to make him forget his vows. But nothing would do him: he had but one idea in his beautiful obstinate head. He wanted the laurel and not the rose, and he kept on repeating Gautier’s axiom, and battering and filing at his limp prose till he’d spread it out over Lord knows how many hundred pages."

"It had a quality she had never been aware of in any other silence, as though it were not merely an absence of sound, a thin barrier between the ear and the surging murmur of life just beyond, but an impenetrable substance made out of the worldwide cessation of all life and all movement. Yes, that was what laid a chill on her: the feeling that there was no limit to this silence, no outer margin, nothing beyond it."

"My bargaining letter, my please-proceed-without-me letter. My whole life I felt like I could never give you the right thing, give you enough; I was perpetually failing. But in these pages, I had articulated something of worth. Here I had let you know me. And now the question was, Would you understand? Would you be convinced that true love can be, despite what we’re told, a forgetting?"

'But she cut in. “You’d never cheat on your husband, right?” She didn’t care about breastfeeding. “I don’t have the energy even if I wanted to.” “See, that’s the kind of stability I’m looking for.” I hadn’t said much about my husband to her yet. I wondered what made her assume stability. A part of me was proud, though. It’s what I’d been after all these years.'

"Had he also been disturbed by the recent famous woman who lost her case against her more famous husband? Had he been stirred by this injustice and then thought of me, his old girlfriend and all her baggage? All she had confessed to him? Maybe he was in a twelve-step program and had reached that pesky ninth step where you upended other people’s lives under the guise of making *amends.*"

"You told me most women, if they possessed even a shred of intuition, could tell when a man wanted them, that one day I would be wanted and I’d have to ask myself if I really wanted the man back, or if I was just in love with the fact of his wanting. How the two could look remarkably alike but were in fact different. I told you it seemed like the wrong question to ask. You threw your head back and laughed."

"According to publicity to be sophisticated is to live beyond conflict."

"The image then makes him envious of himself as he might be. Yet what makes this self-which-he-might-be enviable? The envy of others. Publicity is about social relations, not objects. Its promise is not of pleasure, but of happiness: happiness as judged from the outside by others. The happiness of being envied is glamour."

"The entry on the Virgin of the Rocks is one of the longest entries [..] They do not deal with the meaning of the image. They deal with who commissioned the painting, legal squabbles, who owned it, its likely date, the families of its owners. Behind this information lie years of research. The aim of the research is to prove beyond any shadow of doubt that the painting is a genuine Leonardo."

"But I hadn’t thought about the kids. If I failed them, where would they go? Somewhere bad, that was for sure. Somewhere worse than this life. Carl was ready to send them there. For all I knew, Jasper and Madison would be ready to send them there if I slipped up just a little bit. I remembered that feeling, driving down to the valley, no longer welcome at Iron Mountain. It had felt like my life was over."

“Can I eat it at the counter?” I asked, and Mary shrugged. Of course, of course, it was the best sandwich I’d ever eaten. I first thought it was just because someone had made it for me, but my mom had made some sorry sandwiches for me in my life, so maybe it was the atmosphere. I tried not to overthink it. “This is so good,” I told Mary, who just nodded.

"But once teachers started to tell me about Iron Mountain and the scholarship [...] I redirected my efforts. I didn’t know that the school was just some ribbon that rich girls obtained on their way to a destined future. I thought it was a training ground for Amazons. I made other students cry at the spelling bee. I plagiarized scientific studies and dumbed them down just enough to win county science fairs."

"Delving, never such delving... The Irish and the Czech segments of the Czgowchwz life fused once and for all. Day upon day the vigilants came back to Magwyck to meet this Mawrdew Czgowchwz. She began to write—page after page of new-found English, reflective and interpretive, lucid and analytical. It read like the Book of Life."