Reece > Reece's Quotes

“Leave the letter that never begins to go find the latter that ever comes to end, written in smoke and blurred by mist and signed of solitude, sealed at night.”
― James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

“In the particular is contained the universal.”
― James Joyce

“In contrast, historical time is a concrete and living reality with an irreversible onward rush. It is the very plasma in which events are immersed, and the field within which they become intelligible.”
― Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft: Reflections on the Nature and Uses of History and the Techniques and Methods of Those Who Write It.

“The traveler who's just climbed a steep mountain sits down at the top, and finds perfect pleasure in resting. Would he be as happy, if he were forced to do nothing but rest?”
― Stendhal, The Red and the Black

“Phall if you but will, rise you must.”
― James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

“What imperfections in a perfect day did Bloom, walking, silently, successively, enumerate?”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”
― James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

“Understanding,' in all honesty, is a word pregnant with difficulties, but also with hope.”
― Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft: Reflections on the Nature and Uses of History and the Techniques and Methods of Those Who Write It.

“I bump against the railings and begin to go down the stairs cursing them: one foot in the void/ another foot into the abyss/ another one into nowhere. When'll they turn on the lights in this fucking house?”
― Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Three Trapped Tigers

“Because the dictionary created its suspense with one word lost in a wood of words (not like needles in a haystack which are easy to find, but one particular pin in a pincushion) and there was the wrong word and the word innocent and the word guilty and the word-assassin and the word-police and the word-chase and the word-rescue-patrol in the last word-reel and lastly the word end, and because the suspense of the dictionary lay in seeing oneself looking desperately for a word up and down the columns until one found it and when it turned up seeing that it meant something different, this was better than one's surprise at the last real...”
― Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Three Trapped Tigers

“Geir gave me the chance to look at life and understand it, Linda gave me the chance to live it. In the first instance I became visible to myself, in the second I vanished. That’s the difference between friendship and love.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 6

“I'm always seeking something, it's tiring in the end - and it's only the beginning,”
― Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable

“. . . for his thoughts were but a succession of stars that wheeled about in his skull-sky like the moon and the sun, chasing each other through all the lovely halls.”
― William T. Vollmann, The Ice-Shirt

“I ask again: - Do we carry our landscapes with us locked in our ice-hearts, and can we fit them over what was there just as we can clothe ourselves forever in the stiff and crackling cloaks that lie in the churchyard permafrost at Herjolfsness?”
― William T. Vollmann, The Ice-Shirt

“There is no day that one should skip
But one should seize, without distrust,
The possible with iron grip”
― Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Faust

“Let's plunge ourselves into the roar of time, the whirl of accident; may pain and pleasure, success and failure, shift as they will -- it's only action that can make a man.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust

“Human life as a cluster of mussels clinging to rocks in the sea, human beings as beetles and vermin, man as a shoal of writhing fish brought gasping to the surface in nets. If, however, we stand up close to each individual, so close as to hear each name as it is whispered, to look into each pair of eyes, where the soul of every human is revealed, unique and in alienable, and listen attentively to every story of a day in the life of each and every one of them, a day in the company of loved ones, family and friends, an ordinary day in an ordinary place, with all its joy and delicacy, envy and curiosity, routines and spontaneity, imagination and boredom, hate and love, then the opposite becomes apparent, the one, not as I, but as the I’s necessary. Which is you.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 6

“Come on home. The poppies are all grown knee-deep by now.
Blossoms all have fallen, and the pollen ruins the plow.
Peonies nod in the breeze,
and while they wetly bow
with hydrocephalitic listlessness,
ants mop up their brow.

And everything with wings is restless, aimless, drunk and dour;
butterflies and birds collide at hot, ungodly hours.
And my clay-colored motherlessness rangily reclines —
Come on home, now! All my bones are dolorous with vines.”
― Joanna Newsom

“We can all write about suffering
with our eyes closed. You should show people
more of yourself; show them your clandestine
passion for read meat.”
― Louise Glück, Meadowlands

“life is a succession of misunderstandings, leading us on to the final truth, the only truth.”
― Roberto Bolaño, By Night in Chile

“I am dying now, but I still have many things to say.”
― Roberto Bolaño, By Night in Chile

“One has a moral obligation to take responsibility for one’s actions, and that includes one’s words and silences, yes, one’s silences, because silences rise to heaven too, and God hears them, and only God understands and judges them, so one must be very careful with one’s silences.”
― Roberto Bolaño, By Night in Chile

“The number of people we come close to during our lives is small, and we fail to realise how infinitely important each and every one of them is to us until we grow older and can see things from afar. When I was sixteen, I thought that life was without end, the number of people in it inexhaustible. This was by no means strange, since right from starting school at the age of seven I’d been surrounded by hundreds of children and adults; people were a renewable resource, found in abundance, but what I didn’t know, or rather had absolutely no conception of, was that every step I took was defining me, every person I encountered leaving their mark on me, and that the life I was living at that particular time, boundlessly arbitrary as it seemed, was in fact my life. That one day i would look back on my life and this would be what I looked back on. What then had been insignificant, as weightless as air, a series of events dissolving in exactly the same way as the darkness dissolved in the mornings, would twenty years on seem laden with destiny and fate.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle I-VI

“Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed, with his carrier, and that he spoke to us? Probably. But in all that what truth will there be? [Estragon, having struggled with his boots in vain, is dozing off again. Vladimir looks at him.] He'll know nothing. He'll tell me about the blows he received and I'll give him a carrot. [Pause.] Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the gravedigger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. [He listens.] But habit is a great deadener. [He looks again at Estragon.] At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying. He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on. [Pause.] I can't go on! [Pause.] What have I said?”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up what remains.”
― Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

“Every person is destroyed when we cease to see him; after which his next appearance is a new creation, different from that which immediately preceded it, if not from them all.”
― Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: Volume I - Swann's Way & Within a Budding Grove

“We are all potential Dominicis, not as murderers but as accused, deprived of language, or worse, rigged out in that of our accusers, humiliated and condemned by it. To rob a man of his language in the very name of language: this is the first step in all legal murder.”
― Roland Barthes, Mythologies

“Tautology creates a dead, a motionless world.”
― Roland Barthes, Mythologies