“When all is said, what remains to be said is the disaster. Ruin of words, demise writing, faintness faintly murmuring: what remains without remains (the fragmentary).”
— Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster
“Joy ignores my intentions just as it ignores any effort to keep it. I cannot choose joy any more than I can refuse it. Joy arrives on its own and when it arrives I must experience it.”
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And without that humanization and without the sentimentalization of the world — I am terrified.”
— Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G. H.
“And that seemed like hell to me, that destruction of layers and layers of human archeology. Hell, because the world held no more human meaning for me, and man no longer had human meaning for me.
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“You feel happy when you look back on all you've accomplished to get here. But when you try to sit with the present moment or look towards the future, there is a distinct feeling of dread that you cannot seem to shake.”
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“You wonder if this is all there really is to life. If it always ends with this feeling of nothingness. If the void ultimately consumes us all. You're wildly successful by every available metric and still you feel no joy.”
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“Never affirm, always allude: allusions are made to test the spirit and probe the heart.”
— Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before
“Creativity requires action — it is the movement from intuitive seeing to actual seeing, from having an idea to having an artwork before you.”
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not to believe oneself, but rather to believe in those who do believe: to give priority to all determinants from elsewhere.”
— Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil
“The secret of philosophy may not be to know oneself, nor to know where one is going, but rather to go where the other is going; not to dream oneself, but rather to dream what others dream;
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“The future is never something I can know precisely, but it's exactly this that I must learn to see. Awareness of the future is really awareness of the scope of possibility. It is to see that this scope does not have any hard limits.”
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“Even the most seemingly abstract, sublimely theoretical, mathematicized achievements of science have in reality moved only a step or two away from a prehistoric, coarsely sensory-based, anthropomorphic understanding of the world around us.”
— Stanisław Lem, Solaris
“She does nothing but breathe in and out in the safety of her self-imposed darkness. Still, thoughts bubble up inside her. Thoughts about her mother, about her art, about her friends, about what to eat for lunch.”
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“Eros and depression are opposites. Eros pulls the subject out of itself, toward the Other. Depression, in contrast, plunges the subject into itself.”
— Byung-chul Han, The Agony of Eros
“Compassion is never an obligation. It is not something anyone can be required to do because of an agreement with or duty to another person. Compassion is chosen simply because it is personally felt to be an absolute necessity.”
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“To understand biology is ... to understand that the stream of life, flowing out of the dim past into the uncertain future, is in reality a unified force, though composed of an infinite number and variety of separate lives.”
— Rachel Carson, “Introduction”, Humane Biology Projects (1961)
“But the machine does have a weakness. It is built out of parts that can be changed. In fact, its entire structure is created and contingent. Everything that makes up the machine could be other than it is.”
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“You cannot stop the machine. You can demand that it explain itself, but your question will not be heard. The machine is not something that listens. You can break the machine's parts, but they will be replaced. The machine is not something that fails.”
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“For me the book is the man and my book is the man I am, the confused man, the negligent man, the reckless man, the lusty, obscene, boisterous, thoughtful, scrupulous, lying, diabolically truthful man that I am.”
— Henry Miller, Black Spring
“Writing that creates meaning for the whole of life is beautiful. It is by creating such meaning that we obtain a sense of truth. Not truth in the practical sense, like the truth of a proposition, but truth that aligns with our composite experience of life.”
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“However paradoxical it may seem, myth hides nothing: its function is to distort, not to make disappear.”
— Roland Barthes, Mythologies
“When I discover something in myself that I don't understand I need to allow myself to reflect on it. I need to express what I see, listen to what I express, and also question it.”
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It usefully suspends our great and violent desire to be in the right on every question, and creates an unholy and ungovernable mix of the true and the false. It’s the place where things are true and not true simultaneously: the ultimate impossibility.”
— Zadie Smith, “The I Who Is Not Me”
“In the real world we often want our judgments and moral decisions to be swift and singular and decisive. Fiction messes with our sense of what it is possible to do with our judgments.
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“The problem is that I'm running out of time. There are so many things I want to do, and I feel I need do all of them. But my time is finite. Days are passing and once they pass they're gone forever.”
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Often, in what is discovered, the news will not be good. In that sense an apocalypse is something of an exposé.”
— Samuel R. Delany, “The Thomas L. Long Interview”
“Etymologically, an apocalypse is a “dis-covery” or an “un-veiling.” By tradition, what is uncovered or unveiled in an apocalypse (thanks to the Revelation of St. John) will initially appear more confusing than not, and will be seen to need interpretation.
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“Our tendency at this point is to give up. But we don't give up by accepting that we cannot know what actually happened. We give up by declaring one of the explanations right and giving that explanation our full backing.”
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“Whoever writes doesn’t know. Which doesn’t prevent writing from creating truth without knowing that it does so, the way we sometimes create light, groping around in the dark and finding the unhoped-for body.”
— Hélène Cixous, “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays
“To be capable of seeing the good we must also see the bad, not merely as part of the category “bad” and therefore as something separate from us, but in its entire nature and connection to everything else, including us.”
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