Anders > Anders's Quotes

“Det var noe uendelig trist over henne, selv om ansiktet hadde det alminnelige blide uttrykket. Akkurat som hun var lei seg uten å være klar over det.”
― Stig Sæterbakken, Gjennom natten

“I have greatest confidence in my writing when it approaches an insane condition in a sober and unstrained manner.”
― Flore Chevaillier, Divergent Trajectories: Interviews with Innovative Fiction Writers

“That has left me with the disorienting suspicion that I’ve always been repeating myself, that my every idea has been from the beginning, that my sense of discovery is merely my endless forgetting who I’ve been.”
― Flore Chevaillier, Divergent Trajectories: Interviews with Innovative Fiction Writers

“because after a week without creation—the antithesis of genesis—comes a nightfall of alcohol intake, of cavortingfightingfornicating and other fundamental merriments, so in the scraped-up face of dawn I take to shakes and shivers and cries into an enemy pillow, growing mossy with hate.”
― Marc Anthony Richardson, Year of the Rat

“For I will memorize you. Like slaughtered ox meat I will see every piece of you hooked and splayed on the back of my lids.”
― Marc Anthony Richardson, Year of the Rat

“There was a deep wisdom behind the orgiastic and hysterical aspects of ancient religion; there is much to be said in favour of this flinging open of the floodgates to grief. It might be argued that the decorous little services of the West, the hushed voices, the self-control, our brave smiles and calmness either stifle the emotion of sorrow completely, or drive it underground where it lodges and proliferates in a malign and dangerous growth that festers for a lifetime.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese

“But alas, with poems one accomplishes so little when one writes them early. One should hold off and gather sense and sweetness a whole life long, a long life if possible, and then, right at the end, one could perhaps write ten lines that are good. For poems are not, as people think, feelings (those one has early enough—they are experiences.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“For I did not yet understand fame, this public demolition of something still forming, onto whose construction site the crowd breaks in, scattering its stones.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“You, most lonely, most remote: how they have appropriated you for your fame. How long ago was it that they were bitterly against you, and now they embrace you as one of their own. And they carry your words around with them in the cages of their darkness and trot them out in public squares and poke them a little from within their sense of security. All your terrible beasts of prey.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“Oh Malte, we just go on living, and it seems to me that everyone is distracted and busy and no one pays proper attention as we go along. As if a meteor were to fall and no one sees it and no one has made a wish. Never forget to wish for something, Malte.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one's ashes, the grey scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Then something leapt out of the lamp in a blue flash and shook me till my teeth rattled, and I tried to pull my hands off, but they were stuck, and I screamed, or a scream was torn from my throat, for I didn't recognize it, but heard it soar and quaver in the air like a violently disembodied spirit.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Once, on a hot summer night, I had spent an hour kissing a hairy, ape-shaped law student from Yale because I felt sorry for him, he was so ugly.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“The Laconian peninsula lay weightlessly along the eastern horizon and, slightly more substantial, the outline of Elaphonisi—Stag-Island—loomed between us. Wraithlike on the Lybian Sea which expanded southwards far beyond the divider-point capes of Malea and Matapan, hovered Cythera once again, and beyond it, hardly discernible, Anticythera, the last stepping stone to the two stormy western capes of Crete.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese

“In the afternoons, in the long pre-nights to Lima’s winter, Herr Oswald Teller, from his mildewy room, flooded the house with music and homesickness and geniality. Liquefied Mozart poured down the staircase and formed puddles in the hollows like a torrent of rain that had soaked through the roof.”
― Martín Adán, The Cardboard House

“I am no scientist. I explore the neighborhood. An infant who has just learned to hold his head up has a frank and forthright way of gazing about him in bewilderment. He hasn’t the faintest clue where he is, and he aims to learn. In a couple of years, what he will have learned instead is how to fake it: he’ll have the cocksure air of a squatter who has come to feel he owns the place. Some unwonted, taught pride diverts us from our original intent, which is to explore the neighborhood, view the landscape, to discover at least where it is that we have been so startlingly set down, if we can’t learn why.”
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“It snowed. It snowed all yesterday and never emptied the sky, although the clouds looked so low and heavy they might drop all at once with a thud.”
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale.”
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“I set my coffee beside me on the curb; I smell loam on the wind; I pat the puppy; I watch the mountain. My hand works automatically over the puppy’s fur, following the line of hair under his ears, down his neck, inside his forelegs, along his hot-skinned belly. Shadows lope along the mountain’s rumpled flanks; they elongate like root tips, like lobes of spilling water, faster and faster. A warm purple pigment pools in each ruck and tuck of the rock; it deepens and spreads, boring crevasses, canyons. As the purple vaults and slides, it tricks out the unleafed forest and rumpled rock in gilt, in shape-shifting patches of glow. These gold lights veer and retract, shatter and glide in a series of dazzling splashes, shrinking, leaking, exploding. The ridge’s bosses and hummocks sprout bulging from its side; the whole mountain looms miles closer; the light warms and reddens; the bare forest folds and pleats itself like living protoplasm before my eyes, like a running chart, a wildly scrawling oscillograph on the present moment. The air cools; the puppy’s skin is hot. I am more alive than all the world.”
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies. It is the glimpse of oneself in a storefront window, the unbidden awareness of reactions on the faces of other people—the novelist’s world, not the poet’s. I’ve lived there. I remember what the city has to offer: human companionship, major-league baseball, and a clatter of quickening stimulus like a rush from strong drugs that leaves you drained. I remember how you bide your time in the city, and think, if you stop to think, “next year…I’ll start living; next year…I’ll start my life.” Innocence is a better world.”
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“From even the deepest slumber you wake with a jolt—older, closer to death, and wiser, grateful for breath.”
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“And then England—southern England, probably the sleekest landscape in the world. It is difficult when you pass that way, especially when you are peacefully recovering from seasickness with the plush cushions of a boat-train carriage underneath you, to believe that anything is really happening anywhere. Earthquakes in Japan, famines in China, revolutions in Mexico? Don’t worry, the milk will be on the doorstep tomorrow morning, the New Statesman will come out on Friday. The industrial towns were far away, a smudge of smoke and misery hidden by the curve of the earth’s surface. Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen—all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

“Despite all the immense achievements of the Chinese dynasties, the Muslim empires and the European kingdoms, even in ad 1850 the life of the average person was not better – and might actually have been worse – than the lives of archaic hunter-gatherers. In 1850 a Chinese peasant or a Manchester factory hand worked longer hours than their hunter-gatherer ancestors; their jobs were physically harder and mentally less fulfilling; their diet was less balanced; hygiene conditions were incomparably worse; and infectious diseases were far more common. Suppose you were given a choice between the following two vacation packages: Stone Age package: On day one we will hike for ten hours in a pristine forest, setting camp for the night in a clearing by a river. On day two we will canoe down the river for ten hours, camping on the shores of a small lake. On day three we will learn from the native people how to fish in the lake and how to find mushrooms in the nearby woods. Modern proletarian package: On day one we will work for ten hours in a polluted textile factory, passing the night in a cramped apartment block. On day two we will work for ten hours as cashiers in the local department store, going back to sleep in the same apartment block. On day three we will learn from the native people how to open a bank account and fill out mortgage forms. Which package would you choose?”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

“How do you know if an entity is real? Very simple – just ask yourself, ‘Can it suffer?’ When people burn down the temple of Zeus, Zeus doesn’t suffer. When the euro loses its value, the euro doesn’t suffer. When a bank goes bankrupt, the bank doesn’t suffer. When a country suffers a defeat in war, the country doesn’t really suffer. It’s just a metaphor. In contrast, when a soldier is wounded in battle, he really does suffer. When a famished peasant has nothing to eat, she suffers. When a cow is separated from her newborn calf, she suffers. This is reality.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

“Religion is a deal, whereas spirituality is a journey. Religion gives a complete description of the world, and offers us a well-defined contract with predetermined goals. ‘God exists. He told us to behave in certain ways. If you obey God, you’ll be admitted to heaven. If you disobey Him, you’ll burn in hell.’ The very clarity of this deal allows society to define common norms and values that regulate human behaviour. Spiritual journeys are nothing like that. They usually take people in mysterious ways towards unknown destinations. The quest usually begins with some big question, such as who am I? What is the meaning of life? What is good? Whereas most people just accept the ready-made answers provided by the powers that be, spiritual seekers are not so easily satisfied. They are determined to follow the big question wherever it leads, and not just to places they know well or wish to visit. Thus for most people, academic studies are a deal rather than a spiritual journey, because they take us to a predetermined goal approved by our elders, governments and banks.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

“Modern culture rejects this belief in a great cosmic plan. We are not actors in any larger-than-life drama. Life has no script, no playwright, no director, no producer – and no meaning. To the best of our scientific understanding, the universe is a blind and purposeless process, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing. During our infinitesimally brief stay on our tiny speck of a planet, we fret and strut this way and that, and then are heard of no more.

Since there is no script, and since humans fulfil no role in any great drama, terrible things might befall us and no power will come to save us or give meaning to our suffering. There won’t be a happy ending, or a bad ending, or any ending at all. Things just happen, one after the other. The modern world does not believe in purpose, only in cause. If modernity has a motto, it is ‘shit happens’.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow

“On the collective level, the race manifests itself in ceaseless upheavals. Whereas social and political systems previously endured for centuries, today every generation destroys the old world and builds a new one in its place. As the Communist Manifesto brilliantly put it, the modern world positively requires uncertainty and disturbance. All fixed relations and ancient prejudices are swept away, and new structures become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air. It isn’t easy to live in such a chaotic world, and it is even harder to govern it. Hence modernity needs to work hard to ensure that neither human individuals nor the human collective will try to retire from the race, despite all the tension and chaos it creates.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

“We see then that the self too is an imaginary story, just like nations, gods and money. Each of us has a sophisticated system that throws away most of our experiences, keeps only a few choice samples, mixes them up with bits from movies we’ve seen, novels we’ve read, speeches we’ve heard, and daydreams we’ve savoured, and out of all that jumble it weaves a seemingly coherent story about who I am, where I came from and where I am going. This story tells me what to love, whom to hate and what to do with myself. This story may even cause me to sacrifice my life, if that’s what the plot requires. We all have our genre. Some people live a tragedy, others inhabit a never-ending religious drama, some approach life as if it were an action film, and not a few act as if in a comedy. But in the end, they are all just stories.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

“One imagined these barrel organs, beautifully painted, carried on the backs of little grey old men, whose indistinct faces, corroded by life, seemed covered by cobwebs – faces with watery, immobile eyes slowly leaking away, emaciated faces as discoloured and innocent as the cracked and weathered bark of trees, and now like bark smelling only of rain and sky.”
― Bruno Schulz, The Fictions of Bruno Schulz: The Street of Crocodiles & Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

“This is hell. Today, in our times, hell must be like this. A huge, empty room: we are tired, standing on our feet, with a tap which drips while we cannot drink the water, and we wait for something which will certainly be terrible, and nothing happens and nothing continues to happen. What can one think about? One cannot think any more, it is like being already dead. Someone sits down on the ground. The time passes drop by drop.”
― Primo Levi, If This Is A Man/The Truce: 'Miraculous' Philippe Sands