Jack Wolfe > Jack's Quotes

“This is the counsel of despair which would keep the mind out of hell. The tradition is far kinder in its understanding that to live, to love, is to be failed; to forgive, to have failed, to be forgiven, for ever and ever. Keep your mind in hell, and despair not.”
― Gillian Rose, Love's Work: A Reckoning with Life

“let us say before i go any further, that i forgive nobody. i wish them all an atrocious life in the fires of icy hell and in the execrable generations to come.”
― Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies

“A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”
― George Orwell, All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays

“I had had a feeling of freedom because of the sudden change in my life. By comparison to what had come before, I felt immensely free. But then, once I became used to that freedom, even small tasks became more difficult. I placed constraints on myself, and filled the hours of the day. Or perhaps it was even more complicated than that. Sometimes I did exactly what I wanted to do all day—I lay on the sofa and read a book, or I typed up an old diary—and then the most terrifying sort of despair would descend on me: the very freedom I was enjoying seemed to say that what I did in my day was arbitrary, and that therefore my whole life and how I spent it was arbitrary.”
― Lydia Davis, Can't and Won't

“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“The first mistake of art is to assume that it's serious.”
― Lester Bangs

“Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.”
― Philip Roth

“People are unjust to anger — it can be enlivening and a lot of fun.”
― Philip Roth, The Counterlife

“Contra la policía/Against the Police

My entire Oeuvre is against the police
If I write a Love poem it’s against the police
And if I sing the nakedness of bodies I sing against the police
And if I make this Earth a metaphor I make a metaphor against the police
If I speak wildly in my poems I speak against the police
And if I manage to create a poem it’s against the police
I haven’t written a single word, a verse, a stanza that isn’t against the police
All my prose is against the police
My entire Oeuvre
Including this poem
My whole Oeuvre
Is against the police.”
― Miguel James

“I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time--the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that that was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed. But then time passed and unthinkably grew dead again, and it turned out that that fullness had been an aberration and might never come back.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot