Libra

“Plots carry their own logic. There is a tendency of plots to move toward death. He believed that the idea of death is wov

“Plots carry their own logic. There is a tendency of plots to move toward death. He believed that the idea of death is woven into the nature of every plot. A narrative plot is no less than a conspiracy of armed men. The tighter the plot of a story, the more likely it will come to death. A plot in fiction, he believed, is the way we localize the force of the death outside the book, play it off, contain it. The ancients staged mock battles to parallel the tempest in nature and reduce their fear of gods who warred across the sky.”

“When my daughter tells me a secret, her hands get very busy. She takes my arm, grabs me by the shirt collar, pulls me close, pulls me into her life. She knows how intimate secrets are. She likes to tell me things before she goes to sleep. Secrets are an exalted state, almost a dream state. They're a way of arresting motion, stopping the world so we can see ourselves in it. This is why you're here. All I had to do was provide a place and time...You're here because there's something vitalising in a secret.”

“Oh we are the jolly coverts,
We lie and we spy till it hurts.”

“Spy work, undercover work, we invent a society where it's always wartime.”

“Spy planes, drone aircraft, satellites with cameras that can see from three hundred miles what you can see from a hundred feet. They see and they hear. Like ancient monks, you know, who recorded knowledge, wrote it painstakingly down. These systems collect and process. All the secret knowledge of the world.”

“Strip the man of his powerful secrets. Take his secrets and he's nothing.”

“The thing that hovers over every secret is betrayal. Sooner or later someone reaches the point where he wants to tell what he knows.”

“If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It's the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act.”

“After dark the stillness falls, the hour of withdrawal, houses in shadow, the street a private place, a set of mysteries. Whatever we know about our neighbours is hushed and lulled by the deep repose. It becomes a form of intimacy, jasmine-scented, that deceives us into truthfulness.”

“The books were private, like something you find and hide, some lucky piece that contains the secret of who you are. The books themselves were secret. Forbidden and hard to read. They altered the room, charged it with meaning. The drabness of his surroundings, his own shabby clothes were explained and transformed by these books. He saw himself as part of something vast and sweeping. He was the product of a sweeping history, he and his mother, locked into a process, a system of money and property that diminished their human worth every day, as if by scientific law.”

“Life is hostile, he believed. The struggle is to merge your life with the greater tide of history.”

“History means to merge. The purpose of history is to climb out of your own skin. He knew what Trotsky had written, that revolution leads us out of the dark night of the isolated self. We live forever in history, outside ego and id.”

“We don't know what to call it, so we say coincidence. It goes deeper...There's a hidden principle. Every process contains its own outcome.”

“These were important things, family, money, the past, but they did not touch his real life, the inward-spinning self...”

“Think of two parallel lines. One is the life of Lee H. Oswald. One is the conspiracy to kill the President. What bridges the space between them? What makes a connection inevitable? There is a third line. It comes out of dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, out of the deepest levels of the self. It’s not generated by cause and effect like the other two lines. It's a line that cuts across causality, cuts across time. It has no history that we can recognise or understand. But it forces a connection. It puts a man on the path of his Destiny.”

“There is enough mystery in the facts as we know them, enough of conspiracy, coincidence, loose ends, multiple interpretations. There is no need, he thinks, to invent the grand and masterful scheme, the plot that reaches flawlessly in a dozen directions.”

“Destiny is larger than facts or events. It is something to believe in outside the ordinary borders of the senses, with God so distant from our lives.”

“The nature of things was to be elusive. Things slipped through his perceptions. He could not get a grip on the runaway world.”

“The real Control Apparatus is precisely what we can't see or name...It is the mystery we can't get hold of, the plot we can’t uncover.”

Literary truth is not the truth of the biographer or the reports, it's not a police report or a sentence handed down by a court. It's

Literary truth is not the truth of the biographer or the reports, it's not a police report or a sentence handed down by a court. It's not even the plausibility of a well-constructed narrative. Literary truth is entirely a matter of wording and is directly proportional to the energy that one is able to impress on the sentence.