James > James's Quotes

“What drives people crazy is trying to live outside reality. Reality is terrible. It can kill you. Given time, it certainly will kill you. The reality is pain–you said that! But it's the lies, the evasions of reality, that drive you crazy. It's the lies that make you want to kill yourself.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“The dignity and beauty of the room he and Efor were in was as real as the squalor to which Efor was native. To him a thinking man's job was not to deny one reality at the expense of the other, but to include and to connect.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“As he struck her, he felt his chest suffocating under waves of desperate sadness, like a child abandoned by its parents.”
― Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, The Siren’s Lament: Essential Stories

“The people here had grown emaciated with hunger and toil, and the walls of their houses sighed with grief and sorrow. All the lovely flowers of this land had been transplanted to the palace to delight the eyes of the sovereign's consort, while the plump boars had been taken and served to please her sophisticated tastes. And so, the tranquil spring sun shone in vain on the grey, deserted streets of the city. And, perched atop a hill in the centre, the palace, shining with the five colours of the rainbow, towered over the corpse of the capital like a beast of prey.”
― Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, The Siren’s Lament: Essential Stories

“At a certain time, the father of this prince had served at the imperial court in Beijing, where his talents had won for him the favour of the Qianlong Emperor as well as the envy of his peers. His reward was a vast fortune that ostracized him from society, and later, when his only son was yet in his infancy, he quit this world entirely. A short while thereafter, the boy's mother followed in the footsteps of the father, and so the Prince, having been left an orphan, found himself quite naturally the sole heir to this veritable mountain of gold, silver and precious stones.”
― Jun'ichirō Tanizaki

“After a brief moment of splendour, the whole enterprise too a sad turn.”
― Bruno Schulz, Nocturnal Apparitions: Essential Stories

“They sat as if in the shadow of their own fate...”
― Bruno Schulz

“There was something tragic in that sloppy and immoderate fertility: the misery of a creature struggling on the border of nothingness and death; the strange heroism of a femininity triumphant in its fecundity over the deformity of nature and the insufficiency of man. Yet her progeny revealed the cause of that maternal panic, that frenzy of birthing that had exhausted itself in abortive foetuses and an ephemeral generation of phantoms without blood or faces.”
― Bruno Schulz, Nocturnal Apparitions: Essential Stories

“Emil, the oldest of my cousins, with his bright blond moustache and a face that life seemed to have wiped clean of any expression [...]

His face, withered and clouded, seemed day by day to be forgetting itself, turning into an empty white wall covered with a pale network of veins, in which the dwindling memories of a tumultuous and wasted life intertwined like the lines on a faded map... With his eyes wandering over distant memories, he told strange anecdotes, which always broke off abruptly, disintegrating and dissipating into nothingness [...]

His face was the mere breath of a face–a streak that some unkonwn passer-by had left behind in the air.”
― Bruno Schulz, Nocturnal Apparitions: Essential Stories

“He took me between his knees and shuffled some photographs before my eyes with his dextorous hands, showing me images of naked women and boys in strange positions. I leant against him and peered at those delicate human bodies with distant, unseeing eyes, as the fluid of a vague agitation that had suddenely clouded the air reached me, running through me in a shiver of anxiety, a wave of sudden understanding. In the meantime, the haze of a smile that had appeared under his soft, beautiful moustache, the germ of desire that had stretched across his temple in a pulsing vein, the tension holding his features together for a momenr, fell back into nothingness, and his face departed into absence, forgot itself, and disintegrated.”
― Bruno Schulz

“Suddenly the world began to wither and blacken, rapidly secreting from itself a hallucinatory dusk that infected all things. The plague of dusk expanded venomously and insidiously in all directions, creeping from one thing to another; whatever it touched at once decayed, blackened and disintegrated into rot. People fled from the dusk in silent panic, but the leprosy soon caught up with them, smearing a dark rash across their foreheads. They lost their faces, which fell away in great, shapeless stains, and so they went on, without features, without eyes, dropping mask after mask along the way, until the dusk teemed with those abandoned larvae, scattered behind them.”
― Bruno Schulz, Nocturnal Apparitions: Essential Stories

“I had no brothers or sisters, so life was not difficult for my mother and me. When I think back, I see her clearly with her thin lips resolutely closed, with something on her face like a mask, I don't know – a thick mask, as though her face were the surface of the sea. Do you understand? It possessed not a single colour but a multitude, appearing and disappearing and intermingling. We had no relatives. She and I acted as relatives to each other. It was as if she were some stranger on the road with whom circumstances had chanced to bring me... I used to have – you may be surprised – a warm feeling of being free, that there was not a human being, by father or mother, to tie me down as a tent peg to particular spot, a particular domain... I was not like other children of my age: I wasn't wasn't affected by anything, I didn't cry when hit, wasn't glad if the teacher praised me in class, didn't suffer from the things the rest did. I was like something rounded, made of rubber: you throw it in the water and it doesn't get wet, you throw it on the ground and it bounces back.”
― Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North

“My mind was like a sharp knife, cutting with cold effectiveness, I paid no attention to the astonishment of the teachers, the admiration or envy of my schoolmates... I was busy with this wonderful machine with which I had been endowed. I was cold as a field of ice, nothing in the world could shake me...
After three years the headmaster – who was an Englishman – said to me, "This country hasn't got the scope for that brain of yours, so take yourself off..."
This is a fact in my life: the way chance has placed in my path people who gave me a helping hand at every stage, people for whom I had no feelings of gratitude; I used to take their help as though it were some duty they were performing for me.”
― Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North

“When [...} everything had been arranged for my departure to Cairo, I went to my mother. Once again she gave me that strange look. Her lips parted momerntarily as though she wanted to smile, then she shut them and her face reverted to its usual state: a thick mask, or rather a series of masks. Then she disappeared for a while and brought back her purse, which she placed in my hand.
"Had your fasther lived," she said to me, "he would not have chosen for you differently from what you have chosen yourself. Do as you wish, depart or stay it's up to you. It's your life and you're free to do with it as you will. In this purse is some money which will come in useful." That was our farewell: no tears, no kisses, no fuss. Two human beings had walked along a part of the road together, then each had gone his way. This was in fact the last thing she said to me, for I did not see her again. After long years and numerous experiences, I remembered that moment and I wept. At the time, though, I felt nothing whatsoever.”
― Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North

“She glanced at the knife with what seemed to me like longing. "Here's my breast bared to you," she said. "Plunge the knife in." I looked at her naked body which, though within my grasp, I did not possess. Sitting on the side of the bed, I bowed my head meekly. She placed her hand on my cheek and said in a tone that was not devoid of gentleness: "My sweet, you're not the kind of man that kills." I experienced a feeling of ignominy, loneliness, and loss. Suddenly I remembered my mother. I saw her face clearly in my mind's eye and heard her saying to me "It's your life and you're free to do with it as you will." I remembered that the news of my mother's death had reached me nine months ago and had found me drunk and in the arms of a woman. I don't recollect now which woman it was; I do, though, recollect that I felt bo sadness – it was as thought the matter was of absolutely no concern to me. I remembered this and wept from deep within my heart. I wept so much I thought I would never stop. I felt Jean embraceing me and saying things I couln't make out, though her voice was repellent to me and sent a shudder through my body I pushed her violently from me. "I hate you," I shouted at her. "I swear I'll kill you one day." In the throes of my sorrow the expression in her eyes did not escape me. They shone brightly and gave me a strange look. Was it surprise? Was it fear? Was it desire? Then, in a voice of simulated tenderness, she said: "I too, my sweet, hate you. I shall hate you until death.”
― Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North

“He was a dog, without a shadow of a doubt. But in human form. The quality of doggishness is an inner quality and can manifest itself just as easily in human as in animal form... He was more likely a bookbinder, a tub-thumber, a rabble-rouser, or a party member: a violent man of dark, explosive passions. There, in the depths of his fervour, in the convulsive bristling of all his fibres, in this frenzied fury, barking wildly at the end of the stick I was pointing at him, he was one hundred per cent dog”
― Bruno Schulz, Nocturnal Apparitions: Essential Stories

“By breaking his death up into instalments, Father was accustoming us to the idea of his departure.”
― Bruno Schulz, Nocturnal Apparitions: Essential Stories

“The winter night began to wall itself in with black bricks of nothingness. Infinite expanses condensed into deaf, blind rock: a heavy, impenetrable mass growing into the space between things. The world congealed into nothingness.”
― Bruno Schulz, Nocturnal Apparitions: Essential Stories

“Undula, Undula, o sigh of the soul for the land of the happy and perfect! How my soul expanded in that light, when I stood, a humble Lazarus, at your bright threshold. Through you, in a feverish shiver, I came to know my own misery and ugliness in the light of your perfection.”
― Bruno Schulz, Nocturnal Apparitions: Essential Stories

“Now it is time for me to return to the furnace from which I came, botched and misshapen. I go to atone for the error of the Demiurge who created me.”
― Bruno Schulz, Nocturnal Apparitions: Essential Stories

“I see people for the first time, I smell them for the first time, I am close to them for the first time. I hear the heavy thumping of human hearts. The sour scent of sweat fills the cellar.

Noisy, shapless, with legs that bend, with stiffly mounted round heads, they emit mumbling, hissing sounds.”
― Andrzej Zaniewski, Rat

“I myself have often pursued strange rats, I have inflicted wounds, I have bitten, I have killed. I know this hatred very well, the hatred of an intruder, an alien, a stranger heralding the arrival of others, who from those that are pursued and attacked may easily turn into those that pursue and attack.”
― Andrzej Zaniewski, Rat

“if we ditched redemption, say, or dreams of perfect happiness or complete knowledge, or took our histories more to heart, we might be more happily in this world rather than any other one”
― Adam Phillips, Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories

“Conflict, and therefore anguish and unease, are integral to their sense of what life is like.”
― Adam Phillips, Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories

“the three truths they took for granted about 'Man' ere: that Man is an animal, that he must adapt sufficiently to his environment or he will die, and that he dies conclusively.”
― Adam Phillips, Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories

“They are only pessimists compared to certain previous forms of optimism (the belief in redemption, or progress, or the perfectability of Man).”
― Adam Phillips, Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories

“In their notes from the underground they are not seeking stays against time. They are unseduced by monuments.”
― Adam Phillips, Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories

“If, once, we could think of ourselves as (sinful) animals aspiring to be more God-like, now we can wonder what, as animals without sin (though more than capable of doing harm), we might aspire to.”
― Adam Phillips, Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories

“Darwin and Freud ... are notably sceptical about what was once called the 'perfectability' of Man. Indeed, for both of them we are the animals who seem to suffer, above all, from our ideals. Indeed, it is part of the moral gist of their work not merely that we use our ideals to deny, to over-protect ourselves from, reality; but that these ideals – of redemption, of cure, of progress, of absolute knowledge, of pure goodness – are refuges that stop us living in the world as it is and finding out what it is like, and therefore what we could be like in it.”
― Adam Phillips, Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories

“We have been looking, they suggest, in the wrong place, for the wrong things; spellbound by ideas of progress and self-knowledge only to discover ... that they quite literally did not exist, and didn't give us the kinds of loves we wanted ... That the one pleasure we have denied ourselves is the pleasure of reality...”
― Adam Phillips, Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories