Conner

“In a gourd that had been handed down for three centuries, a flower that would fade in a morning.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, Thousand Cranes

“In this view the body itself, with its two arms and vertical length, was compared to the Cross, on which you knew the agony of consciousness and separate being.”
― Saul Bellow, Herzog

“So things remained until one day, many years later, I happened upon a line in a poem by Heine: “Death is the cooling night.” That childhood memory, lost for so long, suddenly restored itself to my quivering heart, returning freshly washed, in limpid clarity, never again to leave me. If literature truly possesses a mysterious power, I think perhaps it is precisely this: that one can read a book by a writer of a different time, a different country, a different race, a different language, and a different culture and there encounter a sensation that is one’s very own. Heine put into words the feeling I had as a child when I lay napping in the morgue. And that, I tell myself, is literature.”
― Yu Hua, 十個詞彙裡的中國

“He was thinking of Marco, Daisy, Sono
Oguki, Madeleine, the Pontritters, and now and then of the difference between ancient and modern
tragedy according to Hegel, the inner experience of the heart and the deepening of individual
character in the modern age. His own individual character cut off at times both from facts and from
values. But modern character is inconstant, divided, vacillating, lacking the stone-like certitude of
archaic man, also deprived of the firm ideas of the seventeenth century, clear, hard theorems.”
― Saul Bellow, Herzog