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#1

“Refinement creates beauty everywhere: it is the grossness of the spectator that discovers nothing but grossness in the object.”
― William Hazlitt, The Plain Speaker V1: Opinions on Books, Men and Things

tags: aesthetics, art

1 likes

#2

“The task of literature, it seems, is precisely to present, as people worthy of respect and pity, all those who in life are commonly despised. Thus authors adopt a rather lofty position in relation to the rest of the world, taking upon themselves the role of sole defenders of the aforesaid despised, assuming the role of judges, defence, and prosecution rolled into one, and undertaking the hard task of educating the masses and purveying great ideas.”
― Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Immortal Love

tags: despised, education, literature, love, pity

0 likes

#3

“His life had in fact been colossal and, like everything colossal, pointless.”
― Olga Slavnikova

tags: egoism, hubris

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#4

“I must find myself a life, a new life, even if all of life consists only of an endless search for life. What is respect compared to this other thing: being happy and having satisfied the heart’s pride. Even being unhappy is better than being respected. I am unhappy despite the respect I enjoy; and so in my own eyes I don’t deserve this respect; for I consider only happiness worthy of respect. Therefore I must try whether it is possible to be happy without insisting on respect.”
― Robert Walser, The Tanners

tags: happiness, reinvention, respect

1 likes

#5

“The goodness of one man is more powerful than the wickedness of a thousand. Evil dies with the evil: goodness continues to live on long after the good are gone. As the sun that disperses the cloud and returns joy to earth, Barba Yani replaced the sickness in my soul with health. This did not happen without resistance on my part; I strongly opposed his efforts. But whose heart, even one as tortured by life as mine had been, could have ultimately repelled his extraordinary goodness?”
― Panaït Istrati, Kyra Kyralina

tags: friendship, goodness

1 likes

#6

“A home for her, I told her calmly, should come from the dick that knocked her up and then skipped off because no one can stand her two days in a row. She grabbed the tablecloth and threw it at me, but there was nothing on the table, and a tablecloth cannot kill anyone.”
― Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In: Three Novellas About Family

tags: anger, family-drama, fights

0 likes

#7

“I tell you, he had stolen the body of Edgar Allan Poe—and as he shrieked aloud in his final madness, did not this indeed make him the greatest collector of Poe?”
― Robert Bloch, The Man Who Collected Poe

tags: horror, humor, poe

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#8

“What drives me is the fear of forgetting the stories. I don't feel threatened, it's the stories that are threatened: I see a darkness preparing to fall upon them. Write ... write, I say to myself, or everything will whirl into forgetfulness. Write so the thread won't be severed ... a thousand stories are too few. So the flow won't be broken, so the lamps over the desks won't go out. Write, or you'll be without a past, nothing but a will-less plaything of bureaucracy. You'll lie stored in their databases, retrievable, a calculation, an accounting factor, just part of a sum whose loss was factored in from the beginning ... you'll be cannon fodder.”
― Wolfgang Hilbig, The Tidings of the Trees

tags: bureaucracy, history, memory, writing

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#9

“Now traces of her former beauty had become more noticeable than the beauty itself had ever been.”
― Olga Slavnikova, The Man Who Couldn't Die: The Tale of an Authentic Human Being

tags: faded-beauty, sad

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#10

“I recommend to you to take care of the minutes; for hours will take care of themselves. I am very sure, that many people lose two or three hours every day, by not taking care of the minutes.”
― Earl Of Chesterfield, Earl Of Chesterfield: Letters To His Son Part One

29 likes

#11

“If it’s possible to have a thought without a word or an image, without time and space—complete, created by me, a revelation of what remains hidden in me (and from me) but suddenly appears, if it could be born so clearly for all to see, without origin, without any effort of breath, of tone of voice, of rhythm or hesitation, without vision even, emerging like a normal thought, or more than a thought: a thing—if such a thing could exist, then I’d like to tell a story.”
― Beatriz Bracher, I Didn't Talk

tags: honesty, truth

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#12

“Did you hear what they told me?’

‘I did.’

‘What am I supposed to put in my report? That I arrested the twelve Apostles because they were traveling without passports?”
― Massimo Carlotto, Il fuggiasco

tags: border-security, immigration

2 likes

#13

“Love me for my affection, love me even for my weakness; I am satisfied myself. I prefer my feelings to all the fine sentiments of Seneca or Epictetus.”
― Marie Rabutin-Chantal De Sevigne, The Letters of Madame De Sevigne to Her Daughter and Friends

tags: feelings, sensibility, stoicism, stoicism-overrated

1 likes

#14

“The “olden times” are only such in reference to us. The past is rendered strange, mysterious, visionary, awful from this great gap in time that parts us from it, and the long perspective of waning years. Things gone by and almost forgotten, look dim and dull, uncouth and quaint, from our ignorance of them, and the mutability of customs. But in their day—they were fresh, unimpaired, in full vigour, familiar and glossy.”
― William Hazlitt, The Plain Speaker: Opinions On Books, Men, And Things [by W. Hazlitt]

tags: antiquity, old-books, the-past

3 likes

#15

“At the name of Doctor Sangrado, hurrying on his cloak and hat: 'For mercy’s sake,' cried the notary, 'let us set off with all possible speed; for this doctor dispatches business so fast, that our fraternity cannot keep pace with him. That fellow spoils half my jobs.”
― Alain-René Le Sage, The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane

tags: doctor-humor, living-wills

0 likes

#16

“Poor thing. I note I already feel affection for her, and I have the weirdest urge, on the one hand, to go and sit with her and tell her stories or read to her while she's on bed rest, while on the other hand I want to smother her with a pillow or give her a bunch of tranquilizers or sleeping pills so she gives me back the world, so it gets given back to me, the world and everything that has to do with it.”
― Romina Paula, August

tags: jealousy

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#17

“Clever fellows who repudiated each other nearly to the point of refusing to believe in each other's existence, they turned out to be like the two reels of a tape recorder with the tape running between them and broadcasting a recorded text.”
― Olga Slavnikova, The Man Who Couldn't Die: The Tale of an Authentic Human Being

tags: corruption, kleptocracy

0 likes

#18

“What shall I do to be forever known,
And make the Age to come my own?
I shall like Beasts or Common People dy,
Unless you write my Elegy;
Whilst others great by being born are grown,
Their Mothers Labour, not their own.
In this scale Gold, in th' other Fame does ly,
The weight of that mounts this so high.
These men are Fortunes Jewels, moulded bright;
Brought forth with their own fire and light.
If I, her vulgar stone for either look,
Out of my self it must be strook.”
― Abraham Cowley, The Poems of Abraham Cowley

tags: privilege, self-made, self-sufficiency

0 likes

#19

“Gutenberg, Johannes Gutenberg, was the name of that man the devil had intoxicated with Rhine wine in Mainz in 1450, ordering him to invent a new torture for the illiterate and slow-witted.”
― Józef Wittlin, Sól ziemi

tags: illiteracy, printing

0 likes

#20

“Why should I be concerned about how much forward I’ve moved in relation to interstellar space? One has to be practical; I am a positivist, my dear sir.'

'An argument worthy of a table leg.”
― Stefan Grabiński, The Dark Domain

tags: being-a-tool, fantasy, positivism

0 likes

#21

“Normality was normal because it had lost its stories ... only when the mask of normality was torn off did reasons for stories exist once again.”
― Wolfgang Hilbig, The Tidings of the Trees

tags: normality, storytelling

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#22

“There are some who write for human praise, by means of the noble qualities of the heart that their imagination invents, or that they may have. Me, I use my genius to portray the delights of cruelty! Not momentary, artificial delights; but ones that started with man, and will finish with him. Cannot genius ally itself with cruelty in the secret resolutions of Providence? Or, because one is cruel, can't one have genius? The proof is in my words; all you have to do is listen to me, if you want to... Excuse me, it seemed that my hair was standing upright on my head.”
― Le Comte De Lautréamont, Les Chants de Maldoror

tags: cruelty, human-nature, psychopathy

3 likes

#23

“He was careful to instruct him in such an affable, kind, and gentle way, that he easily prevailed with him to consider studying, not so much as a duty of obedience to his superiors, but as the way to purchase for himself a most delightsom and invaluable good. In effect, he soon created in Philaretus so strong a passion to acquire knowledge, that what time he could spare from a scholar's task, which his retentive memory made him not find uneasy, he would usually employ so greedily in reading, that his master would sometimes be necessitated to force him out to play, on which, and upon study, he looked, as if their natures were inverted.”
― Robert Boyle, Robert Boyle: By Himself and His Friends: With a Fragment of William Wotton's 'Lost Life of Boyle'

tags: autodidactism, education, love-of-learning

0 likes

#26

“And such is the power of the organization so introduced, that even when life shall appear to desert it, and its destruction by the barbarians inevitable, they will submit to its yoke. Despite themselves, they must dwell under the everlasting roofs which mock their efforts at destruction: they will bow the head, and, victors as they are, receive laws from vanquished Rome. ... Such is the work of civil order.”
― Jules Michelet, History of France

tags: barbarians, civil-society, civilization, rome

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#27

“A pleasing figure is a perpetual letter of recommendation.”
― Earl Of Chesterfield, Earl Of Chesterfield: Letters To His Son Part One

5 likes

#27

“Oh, how I've envied the lives of those who could spend life sitting down. A place to sit, a place to sit! I'd lament, circling my empty chair.”
― Wolfgang Hilbig, The Tidings of the Trees

tags: overthinking, writers-block, writing

2 likes

#28

“All that is worth remembering in life, is the poetry of it”
― William Hazlitt

16 likes

#29

“Knowledge may give weight, but accomplishments give luster, and many more people see than weigh.”
― Philip Stanhope Chesterfield (Earl Of)

5 likes

#30

“What people that town produces! Nothing but dead, useless things come out of the town and can pass across the borders. Perhaps we used to be something like that ... there's no one here but people who never learned to make their fortune in town. And people who prefer misfortune out here to misfortune in town. Out here, it has the advantage that it can't be confused with fortune. Here no one needs to deceive himself. Here no one needs to forget.”
― Wolfgang Hilbig, The Tidings of the Trees

tags: big-cities, provincialism, small-towns

0 likes

#31

“And if, indeed, there is nothing beyond the corner? Who can affirm if beyond so-called ‘reality’ anything exists at all? Beyond a reality that I have probably created? As long as I’m steeped in this reality up to my neck, as long as it is sufficient for me—everything is tolerable. But what would happen if I wanted one day to lean out of my safe environment and glance beyond its borders?”
― Stefan Grabiński, The Dark Domain

tags: agoraphobia, fear-of-the-unknown, solipsism, trauma

3 likes

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