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Our discussions of his tribulations had the light hilarity of conversation between clowns. Our shoulders almost touching, we seemed to have come within risible distance of each other. As if our imbecilic mirth were due to an assurance that suffering loses weight when tossed to and fro.

Seeing is so superior to thinking and reading so superior to writing. I may be deceived by what I see but at least I never think it's mine. What I read may depress me but at least I'm not troubled by the thought that I wrote it. How painful everything is if we think of it conscious of having the thought, like spiritual beings who have passed through that second evolution of consciousness by which we know that we know

He varnished his painting of the past with a gentle irritation of commentarial laughter. Unlike other men, he took delight in confessing that all his women had deserted him, divorced him, thrown him out. How he had pled with those women to have patience. “I am tired of supporting a waster,” they would tell him at last. “But they were wrong”. “While I appeared irretrievably idle—I was developing,” he explained.

The sweetness of having neither family nor companions, the gentle pleasure akin to that of exile, in which we feel the pride of distance shade into a hesitant voluptuousness, into the vague disquiet that comes with being far from home-yes, in my own indifferent way I enjoy all that.

Poor Betty Flanders writing her son’s name, Jacob Alan Flanders, Esq., as mothers do, and the ink pale, profuse, suggesting how mothers down at Scarborough scribble over the fire with their feet on the fender, when tea’s cleared away, and can never, never say, whatever it may be—probably this—Don’t go with bad women, do be a good boy; wear your thick shirts; and come back, come back, come back to me.

It seems that a profound, impartial, and absolutely just opinion of our fellow-creatures is utterly unknown. Either we are men, or we are women. Either we are cold, or we are sentimental. Either we are young, or growing old. In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows.

There are many people for whom the dullness and sameness of their lives is not what they would have chosen for themselves nor a natural conformity with that lack of choice, but rather a snuffing out of self-knowledge, an automatic irony of the understanding.

… If you stand a lantern under a tree every insect in the forest creeps up to it—a curious assembly, since though they scramble and swing and knock their heads against the glass, they seem to have no purpose—something senseless inspires them. Ah, but what’s that? A tree—a tree has fallen, a sort of death in the forest. After that, the wind in the trees sounds melancholy.

Kafka touches the ground which neither "mythical divination" nor "existential theology' supplied him with. It is the core of folk tradition, the German as well as the Jewish. Even if Kafka did not pray- he still possessed in the highest degree what Malebranche called "the natural prayer of the soul": attentiveness. And in this attentiveness he included all living creatures, as saints include them in their prayers.

Even the greatest translation is destined to become part of the growth of its own language and eventually to be absorbed by its renewal. Translation is so far removed from being the sterile equation of two dead languages that of all literary forms it is the one charged with the special mission of watching over the maturing process of the original language and the birth pangs of its own.

'Not the sort of house I'd want to live in,' said Kenzo. The words were like a command. He was not himself aware of it, but his decisiveness was that of the privileged one whose hope and well-being refuse to admit outsiders. It was not strange that in the hope there was a scorn for the hopes of others and that no one was allowed to lay a finger on the well-being.

She did not know it, but she was actually in despair at the poverty of human emotions. Was it not irrational that there was nothing to do except weep when ten people died, just as one wept for but a single person?

There she was, calling my name through the music in the tone I particularly disliked, the tone that seemed to specially remind me that it was thanks to her I was on this earth at all.

He doesn’t stress the poetic employment. I call it his aw-shucks persona—but I can see the point. When you’re busy with horses people can see that you are busy, but when you’re busy at making up a poem you look as if you’re in a state of idleness and you feel a little strange or embarrassed having to explain what’s going on.

Jumping off the train was supposed to be a cancellation...to enter a different block of air. You looked forward to emptiness. And instead, what did you get? An immediate flock of new surroundings, asking for your attention in a way they never did when you were sitting on the train and just looking out the window. Life around coming to some conclusions about you from vantage points you couldn’t see.

I was not really surprised by what he was saying. A lot of people thought that way. Especially men. There was a quantity of things that men hated. Or had no use for. And that was exactly right. They had no use for it, so they hated it. Maybe it was the same way I felt about algebra—I doubted very much that I would ever find any use for it. But I didn’t go so far as to want it wiped off the face of the earth for that

It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. What justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take "good", for instance. "Ungood" will do just as well.

In Germany today, the notion of ‘prominent’ Jews has not yet been forgotten. The fate of ‘famous’ Jews is still deplored at the expense of all others. There are more than a few people, especially among the cultural elite, who still publicly regret the fact that Germany sent Einstein packing without realizing that it was a much greater crime to kill little Hans Cohn from around the corner even though he was no genius.

Is this a textbook case of bad faith, of lying self-deception combined with outrageous stupidity? Or is it simply the case of the eternally unrepentant criminal (Dostoevski once mentions in his diaries that in Siberia, among scores of murderers, rapists, and burglars, he never met a single man who would admit that he had done wrong) who cannot afford to face reality because his crime has become part and parcel of it?

Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yet—and this is its horror!—it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world.

The prevailing attitude in my family tended to be ‘What have you done for me lately?’ or, maybe better, ‘What have you achieved/earned/attained lately that may in some way (imaginary or not) reflect well on us and let us bask in some kind of reflected (real or not) accomplishment?’ It was a bit like a for-profit company, my family, in that you were pretty much only as good as your last sales quarter.

He had the strength and beauty that sometimes come to flower in Indians of low birth. When that strange race nears the dust and is condemned as untouchable, then nature remembers the physical perfection that she accomplished elsewhere, and throws out a god--not many, but one here and there, to prove to society how little its categories impress her.

Most of the teachers were drawn to teach children by a vague political idealism [but] the idealism that had brought them to us was no match for the listless passivity of children they’d dreamed of inspiring to a soft liberalism that would replicate and flatter their own, children who were instead locked tight inside themselves and an institutional tedium they couldn’t name but had already lost their hearts to.

I remember almost none of early childhood, mostly just weird little isolated strobes. The more fragmented the memory is, though, the more it seems to feel authentically mine, which is strange. I wonder if anyone feels as though they’re the same person they seem to remember. It would probably make them have a nervous breakdown. It probably wouldn’t even make any sense.

Everyone hates the boy. It is a complex hatred, one that often causes the haters to feel mean and guilty and to hate themselves for feeling this way about such an accomplished and well-meaning boy, which then tends to make them involuntarily hate the boy even more for arousing such self-hatred.

In the country that she came from, poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace, Worse Things kept happening. So Small God laughed a hollow laugh, and skipped away cheerfully. The source of his brittle elation was the relative smallness of his misfortune. He climbed into people’s eyes and became an exasperating expression.

The books that he always read with enthusiasm were like aspirin for a headache or like the opaque sunglasses that some madmen wear to block out everything and find peace, because the truth experienced day by day as visibility is exhausting and sometimes brings on madness. Or maybe what he expected from books was messages in a bottle or windows through which one sees Alice’s rabbit skim past like a lightning bolt.

Joyce applied with more thoroughness than any previous writer the principle enunciated by John Donne in a sermon of December 1626, on the subject of prayer: ‘a memory of yesterdays pleasures, a feare of tomorrows dangers, a straw under my knee, a noise in mine eare, a light in mine eye, an any thing, a nothing, a fancy, a Chimera in my braine, troubles me in my prayer.’ – Craig Raine

Cervantes realizes that writers don’t need anyone to sing the praises of their work. We sing its praises ourselves. Our way of praising it is often to curse the evil hour that we decided to become writers, but most of the time we clap and dance when we’re alone, because this is a solitary pursuit, and we read aloud what we’ve written and that’s our way of singing our own praises.

I’m much happier reading than writing.