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To be on an island inhabited by artificial ghosts was the most unbearable of nightmares, to be in love with one of those images was worse than being in love with a ghost (perhaps we always want the person we love to have the existence of a ghost).

We are suspicious of a stranger who tells us his life story, who tells us spontaneously that he has been captured, sentenced to life imprisonment, and that we are his reason for living. We are afraid that he is merely tricking us into buying a fountain pen or a bottle with a miniature sailing vessel inside.

The effort needed to kill myself was superfluous now, because with Faustine gone not even the anachronous satisfaction of death remained.

The island vegetation is abundant. Spring, summer, autumn, and winter plants, grasses, and flowers overtake each other with urgency, with more urgency to be born than to die, each one invading the time and the place of the others in a tangled mass.

Exhilarating !!

I had nothing to hope for. That was not so horrible- and the acceptance of that fact brought me peace of mind. But now the woman has changed all that. And hope is the one thing I must fear.

Surreal and addictive!!

The outlines of her immediate surroundings grew progressively more distinct as her sufferings of the past few hours lost their reality, though the terrible images of the urine-smelling privy, the filthy gravel between the rails and circus employee waving to her from his cabin still swirled rapidly and unbearably around her mind.

There is someone else who is looking for me, but I have no intention of letting him find me.

Captivating!!
'Do you believe in God?' I asked.
'No,' he said, 'I;m an atheist. Being an atheist is the worst possible curse, in India.'

'Ach! As I drink from your spring little birds, grant me your grace to fly away!' And she laughed to herself, unable to imagine how she had thought up a joke at such a moment. But when the birds saw her, they were frightened and fluttered in off in a panic.....

In a few minutes Hadoula's mind was benumbed and she fell asleep. But in her sleep- or was she awake, she hardly knew which-she seemed to hear within her, in her very depths, an infant's voice crying and moaning in lamentation.

Absorbing!!

Old Hadoula had to stay all that night in the cabin, where she experienced the rare and indescribable sensations of murderess transformed suddenly into doctor to her own victims.

Penetrating!!
In her private thoughts, when she summed up her entire life, she saw that she had never done anything except serve others. When she was a little girl, she served her parents. When she was mated, she became a slave to her husband, and at the same time, because of her strength and his weakness, she was his nurse. When she had children she became a slave to her children,

A pleasant sojourn- one which would keep resonating in memory!

That's why human beings are so fond of taking examinations, competitions for for qualifications, undergoing initiations or elections, why they enter so many mystery novels, inexplicably enjoy doing crosswords : they wish to believe there is a fact, only pulmonation, an invisible scene, an aimless bodily questioning, a sexual contingency.

Astounding!

Without Solitude, without the test of time, without the passion for silence, without the excitation and retention of the whole body, without a frightened stumbling, without wandering into a region of shade and invisibility, without memory of animality, without melancholy, without isolation in melancholy, there is no joy.

One of the most profound and piercing voices ever!

The Earth has been around for 3,500 million years. Humanity has lived for one million years. The history of human civilizations has lasted for 10,000 years, without being continuous or evolutionary. The civilized, artistic, noetic, literary part is only an imperceptible fraction of the species Homo. Imperceptible by the species itself, as a general rule.

Wow, what I've been reading!!

As the world grew old, it receded into past. As the past receded, it loss seemed the more irremediable. The more irremediable that loss seemed, the more inconsolable was the abandoned soul who retained the uncertain memory of it in his heart. As the loss compounded the sense of abandonment, nostalgia grew, greater. the greater the nostalgia grew, the heavier was the anxiety became

Writing is not a natural way of being of natural language. It is a parlance that has become a stranger to dialogue. It is strange parlance. It is language become language-to-be. In times past, in the first neolithic empires, writing wrested prehistoric humanity from the worlds of dreams and the imagination. Pregeneric humanity was buried in its picture caves, as in its dreams.

at the passing
of tarnished metal objects;
of opaque crystal and clouded jade;
of streaks of soot on bricks;
of the peeling of paint on the wood;
of the marks of weathering;
of broken branches, wrinkles, unravelled hems, heavy breasts;
of birds droppings on a balustrade;
of the silent, inadequate light of a cradle to eat by, or the light of a lantern hanging above a wooden door;

Every work of art is comparable to a section of rock crashing down in to the water; and so is each season. Circles spread out from that crash; they become lost in the future which repeats itself in them, and in the past which they invent. They are lost, but they have not disappeared.

Ah!
Definitely one of the most poetic of the prose I've ever read, sprawls between critical essay and narrative in a way that is highly peculiar. An innovative and very intriguing work.

"The crowing of the cockerel, the dawn, the barking of dogs, the gathering daylight, a man rising, nature, time, dreams, lucidity-everything is fierce."

What an opening !!
Since the passenger train connecting the icebound estates of southern lowlands, which extend from the banks of the Tisza almost as far as the foot of the Carpathians, had despite the garbled explanations of a haplessly stumbling guard and the promises of the stationmaster rushing nervously on and off the platform, failed to arrive ('Well, square, it seems to have disappeared into thin air again...

He had made them come. He had forced them to come in. In their anger they hoped that the breeze would never rise, that he might be thwarted in every possible way, since he had forced them to come against their wills.

And then, and then- this was one of those moments when an enormous need urged him, without being conscious what it was, to approach any woman, to force them, he did not care how, his need was so great, to give him what he wanted: sympathy.

It's beautiful, unlike anything I read yet!!
Then, knowing he was watching her, instead of saying anything she turned, holding her stocking, and looked at him. And she looked at him she began to smile, for though she had not said a word, he knew, of course, he knew, that she loved him. He could not deny it. And smiling she looked out of window and said (thinking to herself, Nothing on earth can equal this happiness)

Woolf-beauty !!
The truth was that he did not enjoy family life. It was in this sort of state that one asked oneself, does one take all these pains for the humans race to go on ? Is it so very desirable ? Are we attractive as a species ? Not so very, he thought, looking at those untidy boys. His favorite, Cam, was in bed, he supposed. Foolish questions, vain questions, questions one never asked if one was occupied

That business about progress in art is ancient nonsense,.....but in jazz as in any sort there's always a flock of fakers. Music that can be translated into emotion is one thing, but emotion which pretends to pass s music in another.

.........Here everything breathes, a lost contact is established again, music helps, vodka, friendship.............Those shadows in the cornice; the room has lungs, it palpitates. Yes, electricity is electric, it has turned our shadows to stone, Now they are part of the furniture and the faces. But here, on the other hand...... Look at that molding, how its shadow is breathing, that volute rises and fall.

Some of the starting lines set tone of the book:

"She would smile and show no surprise, convinced as she was, the same as I, that casual meetings are apt to be just opposite, and that people who make dates are the same kind who need lines on their writing paper, or who always squeeze up from the bottom on a tube of toothpaste."

Is ecstasy possible in destruction ?
Can one grow young in cruelty ?

You are in love. Rented out till fall.
You are in love. Poetic fires ignite you.
Your friends laugh; they won't talk to you at all.
Then one night, the goddess designs to write you!