Nat’s Reviews > House of Leaves > Status Update

“…readers of newspapers and magazines will probably view news pictures more as illustrations than as reportage, since they will be well aware that they can no longer distinguish between a genuine image and one… manipulated. Even if news photographers and editors resist… electronic manipulation… credibility of all reproduced images will be diminished… photographs will not seem as real as they once did.”

“It cannot be forgotten that the problem posed by exhaustion — a result of labor — is an inextricable part of any encounter with a sophisticated maze. In order to escape then, we have to remember we cannot ponder all paths but must decode only those necessary to get out. We must be quick and anything but exhaustive.”

“…on one hand I’m laughing at myself, mocking the irrational nature of my anxiety, what I continue in fact to perceive as a complete absurdity… while on the other hand, and at the same time mind you, finding myself absolutely terrified, if not of something in particular - there were no particulars as far as I could see - then of the reaction itself…”

“if this crush —slash— swooning stuff is hard for you to stomach; if you’ve never had a similar experience, then you should come to grips with the fact that you’ve got a TV dinner for a heart and might want to consider climbing inside a microwave and turning it on high for at least an hour, which if you do consider only goes to show what kind of idiot you truly are because microwaves are way too small…”

“Zampanò himself probably would’ve insisted on corrections and edits, he was his own harshest critic, but I’ve come to believe errors, especially written errors, are often the only markers left by a solitary life: to sacrifice them is to lose the angles of personality, the riddle of a soul. In this case a very old soul. A very old riddle.”