Paul > Paul's Quotes

“Language can be used only very obliquely of things outside the physical world, not even metaphorically, since all it knows to do—according to the nature of the physical world—is to treat of ownership and its relations.”
― Franz Kafka, Aphorisms

“we cannot think of any object apart from the possibility of its connexion with other things.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“In short, our gentleman became so caught up in reading that he spent his nights reading from dusk till dawn and his days reading from sunrise to sunset, and so with too little sleep and too much reading his brains dried up, causing him to lose his mind. His fantasy filled with everything he had read in his books, enchantments as well as combats, battles, challenges, wounds, courtings, loves, torments, and other impossible foolishness, and he became so convinced in his imagination of the truth of all the countless grandiloquent and false inventions he read that for him no history in the world was truer.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“Criticism should be a casual conversation.”
― Carol A. Dingle, Memorable Quotations: W.H. Auden

“A man rarely feels like laughing alone.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“silk tissue instead of lenses in the frames, so that the landscape appeared through a fine veil that muted its colors, and the weight of the world dissolved before your eyes.”
― W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

“Time, said Austerlitz in the observation room in Greenwich, was by far the most artificial of all our inventions,”
― W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

“Why does time stand eternally still and motionless in one place, and rush headlong by in another?”
― W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

“At this hour time doesn’t exist, actually. The hour just before dawn looks like night, but with all of night’s glamour stripped away, and although habit assumes that dawn will soon arrive and peel back the sky, there is no real evidence of this.”
― Lucy Sante, Maybe the People Would Be the Times

“finally even the nouns denoting ordinary objects were all enveloped in impenetrable fog.”
― W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

“We don’t all share one body, but we do share growth, and that leads us through all pain, whether in this form or that.”
― Franz Kafka, Aphorisms

“like an actor who, upon making his entrance, has completely and irrevocably forgotten not only the lines he knew by heart but the very part he has so often played.”
― W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

“I was talking about pounding a nail in a board, it seems like there’s a board there and all the nails are pounded in all over the place, you know, and every new person that comes to pound in a nail finds that there’s one less space, you know. I hope we haven’t got to the end of the space yet.”
― Jonathan Cott, Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews

“things of great importance have to be slowly produced. I don’t believe in speed in artistic production, and that goes with integration.”
― Calvin Tomkins, Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews

“this crowd, which had merged into a single living organism racked by strange, convulsive contractions,”
― W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

“Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.”
― Matsuo Bashô

“Instinctively he had already become proficient in the habit of simulating that he was someone, so that others would not discover his condition as no one; in London he found the profession to which he was predestined, that of the actor, who on a stage plays at being another before a gathering of people who play at taking him for that other person.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths

“the sky goes out if you should fail.”
― William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems, Vol. 1: 1909-1939

“Tom Verlaine sings about how “Broadway / Looks so medieval,” and so it is, our moment the great shipwreck of time.”
― Lucy Sante, Maybe the People Would Be the Times

“In perennial Absence you see mystery, and in perennial Presence you see appearance. Though the two are one and the same, once they arise, they differ in name.”
― David Hinton, The Four Chinese Classics: Tao Te Ching, Analects, Chuang Tzu, Mencius

“Must I be humbled in order to be lifted up, made low in order to be raised high?”
― August Strindberg, The Inferno

“endeavor’s nobility is ability, action’s nobility is timing. When you never strive you never go wrong.”
― David Hinton, The Four Chinese Classics: Tao Te Ching, Analects, Chuang Tzu, Mencius

“Honor is a contagion deep as fear,”
― David Hinton, The Four Chinese Classics: Tao Te Ching, Analects, Chuang Tzu, Mencius

“But it isn’t true, said Marie, it isn’t true that we need absence and loneliness. It isn’t true. It’s only in your mind. You are afraid of I don’t know what.”
― W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

“How to speak, oh Dream, your silence out loud?”
― Octavio Paz, The Poems of Octavio Paz

“Look at the power of the world, look at the power of the dust, look at the water.”
― Octavio Paz, The Poems of Octavio Paz

“I was suddenly sure I wanted to be part of a journey toward insights so fundamental that they would never change. Let governments rise and fall, let World Series be won and lost, let legends of film, television, and stage come and go. I wanted to spend my life catching a glimpse of something transcendent.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“We are guided by laws that operate without concern for destination, and yet we constantly ask ourselves where we are headed. We are shaped by laws that seem not to require an underlying rationale, and yet we persistently seek meaning and purpose.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“it’s all one single grief.”
― Du Fu, The Selected Poems of Tu Fu: Expanded and Newly Translated by David Hinton

“Who changes, who even slows this dead dazzling drunk in the wings of life we live?”
― Du Fu, The Selected Poems of Tu Fu: Expanded and Newly Translated by David Hinton