lisa_emily

“I studied mathematics which is the madness of reason.”
― Benjamin Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector

“We must allow ourselves to think, we must dare to think, even though we fail. It is in the nature of things that we always fail, because we suddenly find it impossible to order our thoughts, because the process of thinking requires us to consider every thought there is, every possible thought. Fundamentally we have always failed, like all the others, whoever they were, even the greatest minds. At some point, they suddenly failed and their system collapsed, as is proved by their writings, which we admire because they venture farthest into failure. To think is to fail, I thought.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Extinction

“the cracked plate has to be retained in the pantry, has to be kept in service as a household necessity. It can never be warmed on the stove nor shuffled with the other plates in the dishpan; it will not be brought out for company but it will do to hold crackers late at night or to go into the ice-box with the left overs.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

“With a face of wrinkled leather and a ropy
body jettisoned of everything but raw muscle, he was like a heavy-smoking, hard-drinking Bilbo Baggins; the tiger was his Ring.”
― Jonathan C. Slaght, Tigers Between Empires: The Improbable Return of Great Cats to the Forests of Russia and China