Pascal Bateman

“School taught me only to read and write. And that sliver of learning set me on the surest road to starving to death in honesty and ignorance. You were the first to open my eyes to widespread corruption. To have understood that the only forces that drive humanity are thieving and swindling - that’s real intelligence. And you didn’t even go to school.”
― Albert Cossery, The Colors of Infamy

“I'm physically nauseated by commonplace humanity, which is the only kind there is.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“I went into the dining-room, where four covered pots of soup stood on the table, and moved over to the bookshelves to the left of the fireplace. Here I kept two or three dozen works on architecture and sculpture, and a hundred or so plain texts of the standard English and French poets, stopping chronologically well short of our own day: Mallarmé and Lord de Tabley are my most modern versifiers. I have no novelists, finding theirs a puny and piffling art, one that, even at its best, can render truthfully no more than a few minor parts of the total world it pretends to take as its field of reference. A man has only to feel some emotion, any emotion, anything differentiated at all, and spend a minute speculating how this would be rendered in a novel—not just the average novel, but the work of a Stendhal or a Proust—to grasp the pitiful inadequacy of all prose fiction to the task it sets itself. By comparison, the humblest productions of the visual arts are triumphs of portrayal, both of the matter and of the spirit, while verse—lyric verse, at least—is equidistant from fiction and life, and is autonomous.”
― Kingsley Amis, The Green Man

“please delete this quote to avoid spreading misinformation. These are not his words. This quote is a part of someone else’s quote he cited in his review of Industrial Society and Its Future. He prefaced the quote with “A take I found online that I think is interesting.”
― Anonymous