Joe Arrendale’s Reviews > The Trouble with Being Born > Status Update

“I like to read the way a chorus girl does: identifying myself with the author and the book. Any other attitude makes me think of dissecting corpses.”

“Automatic melancholy: an elegiac robot.”

“We get a better hold of ourselves and of being when we have reacted against negating, dissolving books—against their noxious power. Fortifying books, actually, since they provoke the very energy which denies them. The more poison they contain, the more salutary their effect, provided we read them against the grain, as we should read any book, starting with the catechism.”

“Filming a scene, there are countless takes of the same incident. Someone watching in the street—obviously a provincial—can’t get over it: ‘After this, I’ll never go to the movies again.’”

“Filming a scene, there are countless takes of the same incident. Someone watching in the street—obviously a provincial—can’t get over it: ‘After this, I’ll never go to the movies again.’”

“However disabused one may be, it is impossible to live without any hope at all. We always keep one, unwittingly, and this unconscious hope makes up for all the explicit others we have rejected, exhausted.”

“In one of the chapels of this ideally ugly church, we find the Virgin standing with her Son above the globe: an aggressive sect which has undermined and conquered an empire and inherited its flaws, beginning with gigantism.”

“The trouble with using a borrowed language is that you have no right to make too many mistakes in it. Now, it is by seeking a certain incorrectness without however abusing it, it is by continually approaching solecism, that writing may be given the appearance of life.”

“The trouble with using a borrowed language is that you have no right to make too many mistakes in it. Now, it is by seeking a certain incorrectness without however abusing it, it is by continually approaching solecism, that writing may be given the appearance of life.”

“Nietzsche’s great luck—to have ended as he did: in euphoria!”