"From reading too much,
and sleeping too little,
his brain dried up on him
and he lost his judgment.
- Miguel de Cervantes - Don Quixote
-0-
There’s more to life than books you know – but not much more.
—Morrissey
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Found these two at fivedials.com
“The powerful always seek to limit freedom by talking of the misuse of freedom, but freedom cannot be called freedom unless one has the right to misuse it... More than evil itself, I have learnt to fear the menace of good that comes in the form of improving others...” (Rabindranath Tagore from Jibansmriti, Rabindra Rachnabali)
I summarized The Stranger a long time ago, with a remark that I admit was highly paradoxical:-0-
“In our society any man who does not weep at his mother’s funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death.” I only meant that the hero of my book is condemned because he does not play the game. In this respect, he is foreign to the society in which he lives; he wanders, on the fringe, in the suburbs of private, solitary, sensual life. And this is why some readers have been tempted to look upon him as a piece of social wreckage. A much more accurate idea of the character, or, at least, one much closer to the author’s intentions, will emerge if one asks just how Meursault doesn’t play the game. The reply is a simple one: he refuses to lie…He says what he is, he refuses to hide his feelings, and immediately society feels threatened…One would therefore not be much mistaken to read The Stranger as the story of a man who, without any heroics, agrees to die for the truth…."
“Europe has lived on its contradictions, flourished on its differences, and, constantly transcending itself thereby, has created a civilization on which the whole world depends even when rejecting it. This is why I do not believe in a Europe unified under the weight of an ideology or of a technocracy that overlooked these differences.”
We are taken to the limits of human thought. Indeed, everything in this work is, in the true sense, essential. It states the problem of the absurd in its entirety.
“But I refuse to be the dupe of a kind of magic which is still more feeble than their own, and which brandishes before an eager public albums of coloured photographs, instead of the now vanished masks. Perhaps the public imagines that the charms of the savages can be appropriated through the medium of these photographs. Not content with eliminating savage life, and unaware of having done so, it feels the need feverishly to appease the nostalgic cannibalism of history with the shadows of those that history has already destroyed”
- Claude Lévi-Strauss, A World on the Wane (p.41)
"The genius, wit and spirit of a nation are discovered in its proverbs." - Francis Bacon.
"Proverbs embody the current and practical philosophy of an age or nation." - William Fleming.
"Proverbs teach the real people's speech, and open up the hitherto sealed book of the native mind" - John Beames.
‘...the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the
archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the
future. The archivization produces as much as it records the event.’
- Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever p.17
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.- One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
May I, Monsieur, offer my services without running the risk of intruding?
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
The best thing would be to write down everything that happens from day to day.
Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear.
If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.
I am a sick man… I am an angry man.
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane
The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
Every account of the origins of the state starts from the premise that “we” – not we the readers but some generic we so wide as to exclude no one – participate in its coming into being.
A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.- The Trial, Franz Kafka
This is a true story, but I can’t believe it’s really happening.
I don’t believe in God, but I miss him.
The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum!
Enough.
