Some Trick

by Helen DeWitt

the characters went plausibly about their business like impostors in a witness protection programme.

So when I say a writer is a genius, what I mean is, there is nothing I won’t do for him.

Anyway, it was comfortable among the robots. Americans are so natural and friendly and sincere. The Viennese have the mechanical predictable charm of a music box; you don’t have to warm to it.

and though the phrase “cult classic” had come to his ears it did not buy many Marlboros.

You have to give the horse its bit.

Of course, if you want those words in a notebook to be a solution to credit card debt, there is a bridge that has to be crossed. But if you don’t want to crack up you have to be pretty careful. But again this is probably not a good thing to say.

If you have been insane there are so many things you can’t do.

(It was kind of like Joseph Smith presiding over the display of a golden tablet from the Book of Mormon.)

There were paintings on the walls that had been in a room with a crazy guy, a guy who never sold any paintings; you want to be alone with the craziness. He walked from room to room, seeing her across each room, keeping his distance.

There is a German word, getigert, for a cat with striped fur.

He would write a book in which people did not destroy the thing they loved.

“I’m a very good man, but I’m a very bad wizard.”

it was the final humiliation to have nothing better to show than a humble green and white Penguin.

How can you have that kind of wedding and not be just the tiniest bit camp?

At the same time it seemed unfair: she must improvise because he had rehearsed.

‘It is the tyranny of the toast rack,’

The subject of food is like Chopsticks: almost anyone can improvise on it.

Novelty disturbed Edward; he made an awkward remark or two about the old woman, was only happy when he had been reminded of one he saw years ago and could supply a polished little story for the occasion. Repetition disturbed Maria; it was like trying to play jazz with someone who has the sheet music for ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’’ and works it in whenever he can.

Perhaps friendships are a matter of similar collections: you have the original, the friend has a backup. Her conversations with Edward are all on record, but hers is the only copy.

X sometimes likes to be a Philistine’s Philistine.

‘There’s no one to think of the author but God, and God’s dead.’

‘The wound must be healed by the spear that made it.’

All these deathbed confessions of Voltaire — it’s hard to say what’s more interesting, the multiple last statements or the endless arguments about them.

What is a subtext? You may think of it as a movement in the circumambient language, whose presence you divine by distortions and ripples in the text; what lies between the lines is as invisible, as plain to the eye as the breeze which stirs the leaves of the copper beech in the quadrangle, the high wind that toppled trees in Hyde Park. And we know that the disruption is not in one direction only: the text is a kind of windbreak.

‘The author really is like God,’ say I. ‘Dead? Not dead? Opinion is divided.

capitalism requires the existence of someone to pick up the cheque.’

X puts a hand on my breast, cannily pursuing sous-texte sous prétexte.

X likes songs that gesture at inarticulacy. He is drawn to the poignancy of a world in which the unspoken is two-thirds of the iceberg.

language squeezes an author like an orange.

I have mastered subjects and failed to love them. I have looked at the sun and not been blinded; I have dimmed the sun. I will be a lover of the moon.

it’s about how all the words change when people do something atrocious, so they would call a bad thing by a good name and a good thing by a bad name, & in trying to express this he writes this very contorted Greek.

What does it tell us of the human condition if the mind, pursuant to the expulsion of comestibles, explores the opposition between tearjerking & dickjerking — and yet somehow separate from the crap that now is Parsons is the history, the hack cavorting w/ Johnny Rotten, this is a chance that will never

a painting of a beautiful subject is almost invariably a rotten picture. Guaranteed kitsch, in fact, don’t you think?’

‘I strike a generality once an hour, I believe. And then, like a good British worker, I break for tea.’

for if politeness required assent, a note must be struck of firm conviction if assent was not to sound merely polite.

‘I sometimes wonder whether the mirror doesn’t tell us only how we see ourselves.

Cameras may be truthful about the way others see us — I shouldn’t expect passport photographers to have a particularly agreeable perception of humanity.’

It goes without saying that you can take pictures. Of course after a while they want you to take pictures for catalogues.

if you are a photographer you notice when something teaches you about time.

One should choose a language the way one chooses a dog or a musical instrument.

the Russian for Protopope was Протопоп.)