Constance Squires > Constance's Quotes

“We know that attention acts as a lightning rod. Merely by concentrating on something one causes endless analogies to collect around it, even penetrate the boundaries of the subject itself: an experience that we call coincidence, serendipity – the terminology is extensive. My experience has been that in these circular travels what is really significant surrounds a central absence, an absence that, paradoxically, is the text being written or to be written.”
― Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

“The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.
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― Iris Murdoch

“Anything that consoles is fake.”
― Iris Murdoch

“Art and morality are, with certain provisos…one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality. ”
― Iris Murdoch

“Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing.”
― Iris Murdoch

“People have obsessions and fears and passions which they don't admit to. I think every character is interesting and has extremes. It's the novelist privilege to see how odd everyone is.”
― Iris Murdoch

“Write naked. Write in exile. Write in blood.”
― Denis Johnson

“Before this moment I'd lived as a mind. Body, heart, soul, intellect, so we care ourselves into parts. But the whole of us, what can it be?”
― Denis Johnson, Already Dead: A California Gothic

“Talk into here. Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine.”
― Denis Johnson , Jesus’ Son

“WE'RE ON THE CUTTING EDGE OF REALITY ITSELF. RIGHT WHERE IT TURNS INTO A DREAM”
― Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke

“The scene before her flattened, lost one of its dimensions, and the noise dribbled irrelevantly down its face. Something was coming. This moment, this very experience of it, seemed only the thinnest gauze. She sat in the audience thinking--someone here has cancer, someone has a broken heart, someone's soul is lost, someone feels naked and foreign, thinks they once knew the way but can't remember the way, feels stripped of armor and alone, there are people in this audience with broken bones, others whose bones will break sooner or later, people who've ruined their health, worshipped their own lives, spat on their dreams, turned their backs on their true beliefs, yes, yes, and all will be saved. All will be saved. All will be saved.”
― Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke

“Write the unpublishable...and then publish it.”
― Denis Johnson

“. . . things whose perishing had been arrested by their power to make her love them.”
― Denis Johnson, The Name of the World

“To find the people who've became truly sane, seek among those who've managed to do without sanity.”
― Denis Johnson

“Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine.”
― Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

“Sometimes I heard voices muttering in my head, and a lot of the time the world seemed to smolder around its edges. but I was in a little better physical shape every day, I was getting my looks back, and my spirits were rising, and this was all in all a happy time for me. All these weirdos, and me getting a little better right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.”
― Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

“It's amazing when you come to think of it how the human spirit seems to blossom in the shadow of the abattoir!”
― Malcolm Lowry, UNDER THE VOLCANO

“No se puede vivir sin amar”
― Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

“In omnibus requiem quaesivi, et nusquam inveni nisi in angulo cum libro.

(Everywhere I have sought peace and not found it, except in a corner with a book.)”
― Thomas a Kempis

“It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last, just as when we have accepted an invitation we duly arrive in a certain house at a given time.”
― W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

“We take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious.”
― W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

“It was only by following the course time prescribed that we could hasten through the gigantic spaces separating us from each other.”
― W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

“The trails of light which they [moths] seemed to leave behind them in all kinds of curlicues and streamers and spirals..., did not really exist, explained Alphonso, but were merely phantom tracks created by the sluggish reaction of the human eye ,appearing to see a certain afterglow in the place from which the insect itself, shining for only the fraction of a second in the lamplight, had already gone. It was such unreal phenomena, said Alphonso, the sudden incursion of unreality into the real world, certain effects of light in the landscape spread out before us, or in the eye of a beloved person, that kindled our deepest feelings, or at least what we took for them.”
― W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

“Our concern with history...is a concern with preformed images already imprinted in our brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered.”
― W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

“It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.”
― W.G. Sebald, Vertigo

“The more images I gathered from the past, I said, the more unlikely it seemed to me that the past had actually happened in this or that way, for nothing about it could be called normal: most of it was absurd, and if not absurd, then appalling.”
― W.G. Sebald, Vertigo

“My china boy seemed to embody the way no story reaches us without having its heels chipped off or its face scratched away. And how lacunae and gaps are the constant companions of survival, its hidden engine, fueling its acceleration. How only trauma makes individuals — singly and unambiguously us — from the mass product. And yes, finally, the way in which I am the little boy, the product of mass manufacturing and also of the collective catastrophe of the last century, the survivor and unwitting beneficiary, here by some miracle.”
― Maria Stepanova, In Memory of Memory

“Break open a notebook at any point and be reminded of your own reality, because a notebook is a series of proofs that life has continuity and history, and (this is most important) that any point in your own past is still within your reach.”
― Maria Stepanova, In Memory of Memory

“To start writing was to cease to be a curious listener, an addressee, and to become instead the horizon point of the family line, the destination for the many-eyed, many-decked ship of family history. I would become a stranger, a teller of tales, a selector and a sifter, the one who decides what part of the huge volume of the unsaid must fit in the spotlight's circle, and what part will remain outside it in the darkness.”
― Maria Stepanova, In Memory of Memory

“Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet.”
― Willa Cather