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After a spoonful of that honey, wax falling apart between my teeth, I wept, awakened from the dry well in which I had been living to be deposited in a sunlit valley….When I caught my breath I said: You have provided the last pleasure I will ever know, for by the time the Sun breathes into my air vent, I will have turned to stone. Deep into the well of my ear, the Vector muttered: Inevitably.

"Is it true that you've gone mad, Ferdinand?"
"It's true," I admitted.
"But they'll treat you here?"
"There's no treatment for fear, Lola."
“Oh, Ferdinand! Then you're an absolute coward...”
"Yes, an absolute coward, Lola, I reject the war and everything in it…I don't want to die."
"Only crazy people and cowards reject the war…”
"If that's the case, hurrah for the crazy people!”

…she phoned me to say that Tony was very low, needed taking out of himself, did she say, was that her phrase, how a common expression can become so like a philosophical statement, sometimes, in this case, he himself wanted to be taken out of that now alien body, which was not himself, which was no longer under his control, the cells multiplying without reference to his will, destroying him and themselves.

Listening to them was like gathering water without a pail. They never ceased explaining the shape and nature of things, but did so in too twisting a narrative to become memorable. Water gathered around my feet. I tried to capture it with my mind. I asked Dar to hold some. But it was water. Water you cannot hold.

But inevitably it was Charly Cruz, not Rosa Méndez, who answered, saying that apparent movement was the illusion of movement caused by the persistence of images on the retina.
"Exactly," said Óscar Amalfitano, "images linger on the retina for a fraction of a second."

Then she delivered it: a kiss against the dark lines of my neck. And, much too quickly, the hair fell back in place. "Your name?" I managed to breathe. Another light laugh. "Dar," she answered effortlessly. I thought, "She could be my guide" and "Could she be with me?" But asked only, "Do you weeee?" before I ran out of breath.

“There's love, Bardamu!"
"Arthur," I tell him, "love is the infinite placed within the reach of poodles. I have my dignity!"

He believed…that when a person was in Barcelona, the people living and present in Buenos Aires and Mexico City didn't exist…so if you suddenly traveled to cities that…didn't exist or hadn't yet had time to put themselves together, the result was the phenomenon known as jet lag, which arose not from your exhaustion but from the exhaustion of the people who would still have been asleep if you hadn't traveled.

What has our government done…what have they done to us…imprisoned by three rings of barbed wire in a land that doesn't belong to us, dying from malaria and whistling bullets, waiting for supplies whose arrival is always threatened by accidents, ambushes and mines, fighting an invisible enemy, fighting impossibly long days that do not follow one upon the other, fighting homesickness, indignation and remorse?

…to ignore the apparently insignificant was to admit that one was condemned to sit defenseless on the parapet connecting the rising and falling members of the bridge between chaos and comprehensible order…only by doing so could he hope not to vanish one day and fall a silent captive to the infernal arrangement whereby the world decomposes but is at the same time constantly in the process of self-construction.

The world is everything that is the case.
I have no idea what I mean…For some reason I seem to have had it in my head all day, however, although without the vaguest notion about where it might have come from….

Just once I'd like to save Virginia Woolf from drowning. Hart Crane. Primo Levi from falling. Paul Celan, Bruno Schultz, Robert Desnos, and for my parents: Grandma and Grandpa, Uncle Isaac, Uncle Solly, Aunt Sophie, just once.

…one of the boys had told them the story of the women who were being killed. All he remembered was that the boy had said there were more than two hundred of them and he'd had to repeat it two or three times because neither Espinoza nor Pelletier could believe his ears. Not believing your ears, though, thought Espinoza, is a form of exaggeration…First you can't believe it and then you think it's incredible.

…and he saw himself nailed to the cross of his own cradle and coffin…only, eventually, to deliver himself…into the care of the people whose duty it was to wash the corpses…where he was obliged to regard the human condition without a trace of pity…because by then he would know for certain that all his life he had been playing with cheaters…who would…strip him even of his last means of defense….

…these modern catacombs…the prayerlike murmur of…a sacrilegious religion in which the bartender, motionless behind the high altar of the counter, is the golden lamb to be worshipped…the regular customers, who raise their glasses in his praise…We confess our infidelities to the group analyst and he dispenses absolution with his monthly bill. Nothing has changed…except that we consider ourselves atheists.

For the life of me I have no idea why I did that.
If I had understood why I was doing that, doubtless I would not have been mad.
Had I not been mad, doubtless I would not have done it at all.
I am less than positive that those last two sentences make any particular sense.

How will things be after the war, when we get back…Will the ordinary bloke have more of a chance, or will the spivs take over…Are we being the mugs, allowing ourselves to be smashed, burned, our wives left widows, weeping real tears, our children orphans, so that some bright young idiots can dance the night away on some lawn by the Thames? Has the simple offering of our lives made any difference?

As far as I'm concerned he might just as well have gone round the corner and died. But that goes for most of us, doesn't it…What are we doing here? What do you suppose it's all about…I go to work at eight and come home at five-thirty. When I retire they'll give me a clock- with my name engraved on the back. Now you know all about me.
Go away: I've forgotten you already.

—Look...and why you think Al is, I mean if he worked like other people.…
—Come off it man…I mean somebody gets a job and like the first thing they do they try to figure out how to not do it I mean look at you man...writing this music for some band that's getting this money free to play it? Like I mean what's the difference if you get help off that and Al gets it off this welfare....

Green, how much I want you green….
You are a wild one, Ava Klein….
Tell me everything you want….
My heart is breaking….
The scales tip.
Please invoice me. Input me. Format me. Impact me.

…the word dehesa, the dryness of the soil, the oaks being able to prosper only this way for lack of enough water…and he pointed through the window at the lack of shrubs…at the pale soil with its sparse grass and stray oaks on the vast plain, that being the dehesa, you understand, as indeed he did understand, and felt inwardly, since the dehesa was much like his own soul….

“The goal of every memorial should be to be as moving as Auschwitz, but at the same time, that does not necessarily mean that the goal of every memorial should be to be as depressing…I want Mount Chicago to achieve that level of being moving…at the same time, to be less depressing."
"Than Auschwitz,” said Apter….
"Our less depressing Auschwitz,” said the mayor.

“I'm familiar with a half dozen languages…Babel-17 isn't one of them…I want to find out who speaks this language because I want to find out who, or what, in the Universe thinks that way….”

'Oh dear, nurse would be cross, but he is such a darling.' Then comes the exquisite pain, torn away from this tender sweetness, fingers clutching, body arched, screams of despair. Even a rat would have learned that a broken string of pearls and knocked over teacup meant that next day there would be no love, no sugar. The Prince learns in the end, but a rat would have learned sooner.

-All occasion cards Tom, got them for all
different occasions….
-Got a friend jumped out a window, got a card for that?
-Well gee I, maybe get well…
-Can't get well, went home and hung himself got a card for that?
-Well gee I, I don't think so but maybe you could…
-Got a woman on alimony sleeping with a book salesman hell of an occasion, got a card for that?
-Well gee I, like here's sympathy maybe you could…

Widespread had said he wanted to remain being a proud man…He did not have to become a heretic, like some black man addicted to the Australian way of life if he did not want to, and anyhow, he asked, where was the insult in saying the only words that he loved to say and mattered most to him…He was talking about the only two words relevant to his existence, Aboriginal Sovereignty.

…and he was already on board the airplane when the weight of something in his head began to pull two opposite ways at once for it was clear the whole thing had been his mistake, either that or they had mixed him up with someone else, to which he added the possibility that the person they were confusing him with was in fact him, it was just that that particular "him" no longer existed, so there he was….

“I was doodling around one day trying to come up with something creepy, and I drew a man in a suit and a woman in a dress, both wearing these smiling cat heads.”
-Mike Birchall

…I suspected I was God…suspected that I had made the universe…and that I, wanting to experience my creations as one of my creations, had inflicted amnesia on myself, then birthed myself as the human being Adam Levin, and that…my amnesia would lift, and I would know what the experience of the universe I'd created was like for those who weren't God…That seemed to me like something that God would really want.

Here was I, in the midst of a vast continent that was invisible to me though I felt it all around, a desolate paradise, far too immense for my legs. America existed for no one if not for me, but it existed only in my needs, my desires, and my fears.