Thomas > Thomas's Quotes

“You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?”
― Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel

“All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours.”
― James Baldwin, Sonny's Blues

“I am still alive then. That may come in useful.”
― Samuel Beckett, Molloy

“Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, not to be able to say what you think you want to say, and never to stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to keep in mind, even in the heat of composition.”
― Samuel Beckett, Molloy

“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”
― Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“In a word there seems to be the light of the outer world, of those who know the sun and moon emerge at such an hour and such another plunge again below the surface, and who rely on this, and who know that clouds are always to be expected but sooner or later always pass away, and mine. But mine too has its alterations, I will not deny it, its dusks and dawns, but that is what I say, for I too must have lived, once, out there, and there is no recovering from that.”
― Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies

“The search for the means to put an end to things, an end to speech, is what enables the discourse to continue.”
― Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable

“Dear incomprehension, it's thanks to you I'll be myself, in the end.”
― Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable

“The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.”
― Samuel Beckett, Endgame

“You cried for night - it falls. Now cry in darkness.”
― Samuel Beckett

“There’s man all over for you, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet.”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“I've got my faults, but changing my tune isn't one of them.”
― Samuel Beckett

“For me, Shambhala, you see, turned out to be not a goal but an absence. Not the discovery of a place but the act of leaving the futureless place where I was. And in the process I arrived at Constantinople.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

“A word may give me its meaning, but first it suppresses it. For me to be able to say, 'This woman' I must somehow take her flesh and blood reality away from her, cause her to be absent, annihilate her. The word gives me the being, but it gives it to me deprived of being. The word is the absence of that being, its nothingness, what is left of it when it has lost being - the very fact that it does not exist.”
― Maurice Blanchot, Literature and the Right to Death

“To name the cat is, if you like, to make it into a non-cat, a cat that has ceased to exist, has ceased to be a living cat, but this does not mean one is making it into a dog, or even a non-dog.”
― Maurice Blanchot, Literature and the Right to Death

“Don't touch me! Don't question me! Don't speak to me! Stay with me!”
― Samuel Beckett

“The earth makes a sound as of sighs and the last drops fall from the emptied cloudless sky. A small boy, stretching out his hands and looking up at the blue sky, asked his mother how such a thing was possible. Fuck off, she said.”
― Samuel Beckett

“Reading is still the most bearable of all forms of disgust.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Gargoyles