Caleb > Caleb's Quotes

“In Sevilla there was a madman who had the strangest, most comical notion that any madman ever had. What he did was to make a tube out of a reed that he sharpened at one end, and then he would catch a dog on the street, or somewhere else, hold down one of its hind legs with his foot, lift the other with his hand, fit the tube into the right place, and blow until he had made the animal as round as a ball, and then, holding it up, he would give the dog two little pats on the belly and let it go, saying to the onlookers, and there were always a good number of them:

“Now do your graces think it’s an easy job to blow up a dog?” Now does your grace think it’s an easy job to write a book?”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“Was it possible to live outside language? Naturally this question did not address itself to her in words, or as a single lucid sentence. It addressed itself to her as a soundless, embryonic howl.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

“And thus how frequently, in my intense scrutiny of Ligeia's eyes, have I felt approaching the full knowledge of their expression — felt it approaching — yet not quite be mine — and so at length entirely depart! And (strange, oh strangest mystery of all!) I found, in the commonest objects of the universe, a circle of analogies to that expression... I recognized it, let me repeat, sometimes in the survey of a rapidly-growing vine — in the contemplation of a moth, a butterfly, a chrysalis, a stream of running water. I have felt it in the ocean; in the falling of a meteor. I have felt it in the glances of unusually aged people... I have been filled with it by certain sounds from stringed instruments, and not unfrequently by passages from books.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, Ligeia

“To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones