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“I was convinced, rather, that the anguish in which that love sooner or later ended was a lens through which to look at the entire West. Naples was the great European metropolis where faith in technology, in science, in economic development, in the kindness of nature, in history that leads of necessity to improvement, in democracy, was revealed, most clearly and far in advance, to be completely without foundation. To be born in that city—I went so far as to write once, thinking not of myself but of Lila’s pessimism—is useful for only one thing: to have always known, almost instinctively, what today, with endless fine distinctions, everyone is beginning to claim: that the dream of unlimited progress is in reality a nightmare of savagery and death.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“What has made it impossible for us to live in time like fish in water, like birds in air, like children? It is the fault of Empire! Empire has created the time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe. Empire dooms itself to live in history and plot against history. One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation. A mad vision yet a virulent one:”
― J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians

“Before Schopenhauer, the artist was generally seen as someone who manufactured things – things that were admittedly difficult to manufacture, and of a special order, such as concertos, sculptures and plays – but it was still a matter of manufacture. This is, of course, a legitimate point of view – and Schopenhauer would be the last person to overlook the difficulties in conceiving and executing a work of art. (People these days sometimes try to get back to this idea in order to minimize art, to make it a little more harmless, as when novelists are considered as mere story tellers, and contemporary artists chatter about their craft.) But the original point, the generating point of all creation, is fundamentally quite different; it consists in an innate (and thus not teachable) disposition for a passive and, as it were, dumbstruck contemplation of the world. The artist is always someone who might just as well do nothing but immerse himself contentedly in the world and in the vague daydream associated with it. Today, when art has become accessible to the masses and generates considerable financial flows, this has very comical consequences. Thus, the ambitious and enterprising individual with a range of social skills who nurses the ambition to have a career in art will rarely succeed; the palm will always go to pathetic blob-like folk who everyone initially thought were just losers.”
― Michel Houellebecq, In the Presence of Schopenhauer

“it is also, according to Nietzsche, a lesson in style (because morality and style are two sides of the same coin): ‘Schopenhauer’s rough and somewhat bear-like soul teaches us not so much to feel the absence of the suppleness and courtly charm of good French writers as to disdain it’.17 Did Nietzsche always draw all the consequences of this? Houellebecq certainly did: it is no coincidence if he constantly replies to all those who eternally reproach him for lack of style by quoting Schopenhauer’s famous saying ‘the first – and virtually the only – condition of a good style is having something to say’.”
― Michel Houellebecq, In the Presence of Schopenhauer