If Michelangelo were straight, the Sistine Chapel would have been painted basic white and with a roller.
-Rita Mae Brown

Missions are stupid, Tereza. I have no mission. No one has. And it's a terrific relief to realize you're free, free of all missions.
-Tomas, of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Always too eager for future,
We pick up bad habits of expectancy.
-Philip Larkin

If Saussure could have foreseen what he started, he may well have stuck to the genitive case in Sanskrit.
-Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
-1984, George Orwell

THE HAND
-A short story by Leonard Michaels-

Oh it was gorgeosity and yumyumyum. When it came to the Scherzo I could viddy myself very clear running and running on like very light and mysterious nogas, carving the whole litso of the creeching world with my cut-throat britva. And there was the slow movement and the lovely last singing movement still to come. I was cured all right.
-Alex, of Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange

Ma il sangue, e' vero che ha un ritmo
in certi mesi detti primavera
accelerato? e vale anche per noi, qui sotto il ritmo
della citta'?
-Elio Pagliarani

Literature is here to afford more pleasure, not more propriety.
-Roland Barthes, Introduction to Renauld Camus' Tricks

But one can do more than that; one can try to re-create reality, try to build up another instead, from which the most unbearable features are eliminated and replaced by others corresponding to one's wishes.
-Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents

Rope hung like tropical fruit, beautifully braided strands, thick, brown, strong. What a great thing a coil of rope is to look at and to feel.
-Jack Gladney of Don DeLillo's White Noise

. . . if the characters in a story can be readers or spectators, then we, their readers or spectators, can be fictitious.
-"Partial Enchantments of the Quixote," J. L. Borges

. . . they were becoming, as some would say, weather-conscious. A burst of sunshine was enough to make them seem delighted with the world, while rainy days gave a dark cast to their faces and their mood. A few weeks before, they had been free of this absurd subservience to the weather, because they had not to face life alone. . .
-Albert Camus, The Plague

Or suppose that he dozes off in some even more abnormal and divergent position, sitting in an armchair, for instance, after dinner: then the world will go hurtling out of orbit, the magic chair will carry him at full speed through time and space, and when he opens his eyes again he will imagine that he went to sleep months earlier in another place.
-Remembrance of Things Past (Swann's Way), Marcel Proust

Then came adolescence---half my waking life spent locked behind the bathroom door, firing my wad down the toilet bowl or into the soiled clothers in the laundry hamper, or splat, up against the medicine-chest mirror, before which I stood in my dropped drawers so I could see how it looked coming out. Or else I was doubled over my flying fist eyes pressed closed but mouth wide open, to take that sticky sauce of buttermilk and Clorox on my own tongue and teeth---though not infrequently, in my blindness and ecstasy, I got it all in the pompadour, like a blast of Wildroot Cream Oil.
-Alex Portnoy of Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint

Where was his boyhood now? Where was the soul that had hung back from her destiny, to brood alone upon the shame of her wounds and in her house of squalor and subterfuge to queen it in faded cerements and in wreaths that withered at the touch? Or where was he?
-Stephen Dedalus of James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist

The message that 'love' will solve all of our problems is repeated incessantly in contemporary culture -- like a philosophical tom tom.  It would be closer to the truth to say that love is a contagious and virulent disease which leaves a victim in a state of near imbecility, paralysis, profound melancholia, and sometimes culminates in death.
-Quentin Crisp, Manners from Heaven

Style is being yourself, but on purpose.
-Quentin Crisp

I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen "King Lear," never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our mind, and, smilarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the second-rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us. We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical. We would prefer not to have known at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen.
-Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

And I thought to myself how those fast little articles forget everything, everything, while we, old lovers, treasure every inch of their nymphancy.
-Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

Mists of tenderness enfolded mountains of longing.
-Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

I moved toward my glimmering darling, stopping or retreating every time I thought she stirred or was about to stir. A breeze from wonderland had begun to affect my thoughts, and now they seemed couched in italics, as if the surface reflecting them were wrinkled by the phantasm of that breeze. Time and again my consciousness folded the wrong way, my shuffling body entered the sphere of sleep, shuffled out again, and once or twice I caught myself drifting into a melancholy snore. Mists of tenderness enfolded mountains of longing.
-Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

"Good Lord, Jeeves! Is there anything you don't know?"
"I could not say, sir."
-"The Metropolitan Touch," P. G. Wodehouse

To be free, after all, is not to be undisciplined.
-"Why are Americans afraid of Dragons?" Ursula K. Le Guin

Now, I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, that child would grow up to be an eggplant.
-"Why are Americans afraid of Dragons?" Ursula K. Le Guin

You see, I think we have a terrible thing here: a hardworking, upright, responsible citizen, a full-grown, educated person, who is afraid of dragons, and afraid of hobbits, and scared to death of fairies. It's funny, but it's also terrible. Something has gone very wrong. I don't know what to do about it but to try and give an honest answer to that person's question, even though he often asks it in an aggressive and contemptuous tone of voice. "What's the good of it all?" he says. "Dragons and hobbits and little green men---what's the use of it?"
The truest answer, unfortunately, he won't even listen to. He won't hear it. The truest answer is, "The use of it is to give you pleasure and delight."
-"Why are Americans afraid of Dragons?" Ursula K. Le Guin

There is an inverse correlation between fantasy and money. That is a law, known to economists as Le Guin's Law.
-"Why are Americans afraid of Dragons?" Ursula K. Le Guin

For fantasy is true, of course. It isn't factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons, because they are afraid of freedom.
-"Why are Americans afraid of Dragons?" Ursula K. Le Guin

Of man's first disobedience and the fruit
Of that forbitten tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, Heavenly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That shepherd who first taught the chosen seed
In the beginning how the heavens and the earth
Rose out of Chaos: or, if Sion hill
Delight the more, and Siloa's brook that flowed
Fast by the oracle of God, I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventurous song
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th' Aonian mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.
-Paradise Lost, Book 1, John Milton

FAUSTUS. Ah Faustus,
Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,
And then thou must be damned perpetually.
Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven,
That time may cease, and midnight never come.
Fair Nature's eye, rise, rise again, and make
Perpetual day, or let this hour be but
A year, a month, a week, a natural day,
That Faustus may repent and save his soul.
O lente, lente currite noctis equi!
Dr. Faustus, Scene 13, Christopher Marlowe

Whan that April with his showres soote
The droughte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veine in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendered is the flowr;
Whan Zephyrus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hat in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
And smale fowles maken melodye
That sleepen al the night with open ye---
So priketh hem Nature in hir corages---
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palperes for to seeken straunge strondes
To ferne halwes, couthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond to Canterbury they wende,
The holy blisful martyr for to seeke
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seke.
-The Canterbury Tales, The General Prologue, Geoffrey Chaucer

Time's Arrow, by Martin Amis, comes from the perspective of a narrator for whom time travels in reverse...

There's probably a straightforward explanation for the impossible weariness I feel. A perfectly straightforward explanation. It is a mortal weariness. Maybe I'm tired of being human, if human is what I am. I'm tired of being human.
-Time's Arrow, Martin Amis

I know how people disappear. Where do they disappear to? Don't ask that question. Never ask it. It's none of your business. The little children on the street, they get littler and littler. At some point it is thought necessary to convine them to strollers, later to backpacks. Or they are held in the arms and quietly soothed---of course they're sad to be going. In the very last months they cry more than ever. And no longer smile. The mothers then proceed to the hospital. where else? Two people go into that room, the room with the forceps, the soiled bib. Two go in. But only one comes out. Oh, the poor mothers, you can see how they feel during the long goodbye, the long goodbye to babies.
-Time's Arrow, Martin Amis

Creation is easy. Also ugly. Hier is kein warum. Here there is no why. Here there is no when, no how, no where. Our preternatural purpose? To dream a race. To make a people from the weather. From thunder and from lightning. With gas, with electricity, with shit, with fire.
-Time's Arrow, Martin Amis

The Auschwitz universe, it has to be allowed, was fiercely coprocentric. It was made of shit. In the early months I still had my natural aversion to overcome, before I understood the fundamental strangeness of the process of fruition.... The Scheissekommando was made up of our most cultured patients: academics, rabbis, writers, philosophers. As they worked they sang arias, and whistled scraps of symphonies, and recited poetry, and talked of Heine, and Schiller, and Goethe...In the officers' club, when we are drinking (which we nearly always are), and where shit is constantly mentioned and invoked, we sometimes refer to Auschwitz as Anus Mundi. And I can think of no finer tribute than that.
-Time's Arrow, Martin Amis

She keeps saying, "Where am I? Where am I" "In the hospital," Odilo keeps dourly replying. Das Krankenhaus, Mutti. Im Krankenhaus.
In the what? I want to take her hand and say, Mother. You are on a globe that looks like a crystal ball or a marble in a light bed of cotton wool. Birds fly around it. Mother, you are on the planet earth.
-Time's Arrow, Martin Amis

With a flicker as of a light going up, the casements of a window there suddenly flew open; a human figure, faint and insubstantial at that distance and that height, leaned abruptly far forward and stretched both arms still farther. Who was it? A friend? A good man? Someone who sympathized? Someone who wanted to help? Was it one person only? Or was it mankind? Was help at hand? Were there arguments in his favour that had been overlooked? Of course there mst be. Logic is doubtless unshakable, but it cannot withstand a man who wants to go on living. Were was the Judge whom he had never seen? Where was the High Court, to which he had never penetrated? He raised his hands and spread out all his fingers.
-The Trial, Franz Kafka

"That means I belong to the Court," said the priest. "So why should I want anything from you? The Court wants nothing from you. It receives you when you come and it dismisses you when you go."
-The Trial, Franz Kafka

He was too tired to survey all the conclusions arising from the story, and the trains of thought into which it was leading him ere unfamiliar, dealing with impalpabilities better suited to a theme for discussion among court officials than for him. The simple story had lost its clear outline, he wanted to put it out of his mind, and the priest, who now showed great delicacy of feeling, suffered him to do so and accepted his comment in silence, although undoubtedly he did not agree with it.
-The Trial, Franz Kafka

K. felt a little forlorn as he advanced, a solitary figure between the rows of empty seats, perhaps with the priest's eyes following him; and the size of the Cathedral struck him as bordering on the limit of what human beings could bear.
-The Trial, Franz Kafka

A. J. once reserved a table a year in advance Chez Robert where a huge, icy gourmet broods over the greatest cuisine in the world. So baneful and derogatory is his gaze that many a client, under that withering blast, has rolled up on the floor and pissed all over himself in convulsive attempts to ingratiate.
-Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs

In the City Market is the Meet Cafe. Followers of obsolete, unthinkable trades doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, pushers of souped-up Harmaline, junk reduced to pure habit offering precarious vegetable serenity, liquids to induce Latah, Tithonian longevity serums, black marketeers of World War III, excisors of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebephrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebephrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit, bureaucrats of spectral departments, officials of unconstituted police states, a Lesbian dwarf who has perfected operation Bang-utot, the lung erection that strangles a sleeping enemy, sellers of orgone tanks and relaxing machines, brokers of exquisite dreams and memories tested on the sensitized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw materials of the will, doctors skilled in the treatment of diseases dormant in the black dust of ruined cities, gathering virulence in the white blood of eyeless worms feeling slowly to the surface and the human host, maladies of the ocean floor and the stratosphere, maladies of the laboratory and atomic war.... A place where the unknown past and the emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum...Larval entities waiting for a live one.
-Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs

Windowless cubicle with blue walls. Dirty pink curtain cover the door. Red bugs crawl on the wall, cluster in corners. Naked boy in the middle of the room twang a two-string oud, trace an arabesque on the floor. Another boy lean back on the bed smoking keif and blow smoke over his erect cock. They play game with tarot cars on the bed to see who fuck who. Cheat. Fight. Roll on the floor snarling and spitting like young animals. The loser sit on the floor chin on knees, licks a broken tooth. The winner curls up on the bed pretending to sleep.
-Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs

Gentle reader, the ugliness of that spectacle buggers description. Who can be a cringing pissing coward, yet vicious as a purple-assed mandril, alternating these deplorable conditions like vaudeville skits? Who can shit on a fallen adversary who, dying, eats the shit and screams with joy? Who can hang a weak passive and catch his sperm in mouth like a vicious dog? Gentle reader, I fain would spare you this, but my pen hath its will like the Ancient Mariner. Oh Christ what a scene is this! Can tongue or pen accommodate these scandals? A bestly young hooligan has gouged out the eye of his confrere and fuck him in the brain. "This brain atrophy already, and dry as grandmother's cunt."
-Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs

After her fall into the water, she stands upright. The pool is not very deep at that spot, the water reaches to her waist; she stays thus for a few moments, her head high, her torso arched. Then she lets herself fall again. A scarf from her dress works free and floats behind her the way memories float behind the dead. Again she stands up, her head tipped back slightly, her arms spread; as if to run, she moves forward a few steps, where the pool floor slants down, then she goes under again. Thus she proceeds like some aquatic animal, a mythological duck letting its head vanish beneath the surface and then raising it, tipping it upward. These movements sing the yearning to live in the heights or else perish in the watery deep.
-Slowness, Milan Kundera

The---the other important joke for me is one that's, uh, usually attributed to Groucho Marx, but I think it appears originally in Freud's Wit and Its Relation to the Uncionscious. And it goes like this---I'm paraphrasing: Uh..."I would never wanna belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member." That's the key joke of my adult life in terms of my relationships with women.
-Annie Hall, Woody Allen

And I wondered if a memory is something you have or something you've lost. . . .
-Another Woman, Woody Allen

PROFESSOR LEVY: You will notice that what we are aiming at when we fall in love is a very strange paradox. The paradox consists of the fact that when we fall in love we are seeking to re-find all or some of the people to whom we were attached as children. On the other hand, we ask our beloved to correct all of the wrongs that these early parents or siblings inflicted upon us. So that love contains in it the contradiction. The attempt to return to the past and the attempt to undo the past.
-Crimes and Misdemeanours, Woody Allen

The first rule to become wealthy is not to lose money. The second is not to forget the first.
-Warren Buffet

Let us first consider luck, good and bad, in the way things turn out.... It includes the truck driver who accidentally runs over a child.... The driver, if he is entirely without fault, will feel terrible about his role in the event, but will not have to reproach himself. Therefore, this example of agent-regret is not yet a case of moral bad luck However, if the driver was guilty of even a minor degree of negligence---failing to have his brakes checked recently, for example---then if that negligence contributes to the death of the child, he will not merely feel terrible. He will blame himself for the death. And what makes this an example of moral luck is that he would have to blame himself only slightly for the negligence itself if no situation arose which required him to brake suddenly and violently to avoid hitting a child. Yet the negligence is the same in both cases, and the driver has no control over whether a child will run into his path.
-"Moral Luck," Thomas Nagel

Qu'est ce qu'ils savent de l'amour, et qu'est ce qu'ils peuvent comprendre?
S'ils ne comprennent pas la poesie, s'ils ne sentent pas la musique, qu'est ce qu'ils peuvent comprendre de cette passion en comparaison avec laquelle la rose est grossiere et le parfum des violettes un tonnerre?
-Caid Ali (Ezra Pound)
(What do they know about love, and what can they understand? / If they do not understand poetry, if they do not feel music, what can they understand of this passion in comparison with which the rose is crude and the perfume of violets a clap of thunder?)

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you

wholly be a fool
while spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
---the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

-E. E. Cummings

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While somebody is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
-"Musee des Beaux Arts," W.H. Auden

We who are
your closest friends
feel the time
has come to tell you
that every Thursday
we have been meeting
as a group,
to devise ways
to keep you
in perpetual uncertainty
frustration
dicontent and
torture
by neither loving you
as much as you want
nor cutting you adrift.
Your analyst is
in on it,
plus your boyfriend
and your ex-husband;
and we have pledged
to disappoint you
as long as you need us.
In announcing our
association
we realized we have
placed in your hands
a possible antidote
against uncertainty
indeed against ourselves.
But since our Thursday nights
have brought us
to a community
of purpose
rare in itself
with you as
the natural center,
we feel hopeful you
will continue to  make unreasonable
demands for affection
if not as a consequence
of your disastrous personality
then for the good of the collective.

-Philip Lopate

There are no facts, only interpretations.
-Nietzche

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect on art.
-Susan Sontag

A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry

He that tries to reccomend [Shakespeare] by select quotations, will succeed like the pedant in Hierocles, who, when he offered his house to sale, carried a brick in his pocket as a specimen.
-Ben Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare

Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world and people die of it just as they die of any other disease. Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought is not catching.
-Oscar Wilde, The decay of lying

It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of
the world is in the visible, not the invisible.
-Oscar Wilde

The good are rewarded and the evil are punished. And that is what fiction is.
-Oscar Wilde

Mediocribus esse poetis
Non dii, non homines, non concessere columnae
-Horace, Art of Poetry

(But men and gods and booksellers won't put up
With second-rate poets.)

The priest was a friend and a cheerful sight, but the undertaker and his helpers, hiding behind their limousines, were not, and aren't they at the root of most of our troubles with the claim that death is a violet-flavored kiss? How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love and who will sound the alarm?
-John Cheever, "The Death of Justinia"

Why take pains to prove that an ape is not a Newton when it is self-evident that he is not a man?
-William Wordsworth, "Preface to Lyrical Ballads"

NOR LET THIS NECESSITY of producing immediate pleasure be considered as a degradation of the poet's art. It is far otherwise. It is an acknowledgement of the beauty of the universe...further, it a homage paid to the native and naked dignity of a man, to the grand elementary principle of pleasure, by which he knows, and feels, and lives, and moves.
-William Wordsworth, "Preface to Lyrical Ballads"

I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy.
-jj, ulysses

Pretenders: live their lives.
-same

Contradiction. Do i contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself.
-same

A darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend.
-same

I am the boy
that can enjoy
invisibility.
-same

Gia' nella vetrina della libereria hai individuato la copertina col titolo che cercavi. Seguendo questa traccia visiva ti sei fatto largo nel negozio attraverso il fitto sbarramento dei Libri Che Non Hai Letto che ti guardavano accigliati dai banchi e dagli scaffali cercando d'intimidirti. Ma tu sai che non devi lasciarti mettere in soggezione, che tra loro s'estendono per ettari ed ettari i Libri Che Puoi Fare A Meno Di Leggere, i Libri Fatti Per Altri Usi Che La Letteratura, i Libri Gia' Letti senza Nemmeno Bisogno D'Aprirli In Quanto Appartenti Alla Categoria Del Gia' Letto Prima Ancora D'Essere Stato Scritto. E cosi' spuperi la prima cinta dei baluardi e ti piomba addosso la fanteria dei Libri Che Se Tu Avessi Piu' Vite Da Vivere Certamente Anche Questi Li Leggeresti Volentieri Ma Purtroppo I Giorni Cha Hai Da Vivere Sono Quelli Che Sono. Con rapida mossa li scavalchi e ti porti in mezzo alla falangi dei Libri Che Hai Inenzione Di Leggere Ma Prima Ne Dovresti Legger Degli Altri, dei Libri Troppo Cari Che Potresti Aspettare A Comprarli Quando Saranno Rivenduti A Meta' Prezzo, dei Libri Idem Come Sopra Quando Verranno Ristampati Nei Tascabili dei Libri Che Potresti Domandare A Qualcuno Se Ti Li Presta, dei Libri Che Tutti Hanno Letto Dunque E' Quasi Come Se Li Avessi Letti Anche Tu. Sventando questi assalti, ti porti sotto le torri del fortilizio, dove fanno resistenza
i Libri Che Da Tanto Tempo Hai In Programma Di Leggere
i Libri Che Da Anni Cercavi Senza Trovarli,
i Libri Che Riguardano Qualcosa Di Cui Ti Occupi In Questo Momento
i Libri Che Vuoi Avere Per Tenerli A Portata Di Mano In Ogni Evenienza,
i Libri Che Potresti Metter Da Parte Per Leggerli Magari Quest'Estate,
i Libri Che Ti Mancano Per Affiancarli Ad Altri Libri Nel Tuo Scaffale,
i Libri Che Ti Ispirano Una Curiosita' Improvvisa, Frenetica E Non Chiaramente Giustificabile
Ecco che ti e' stato possibile ridurre il numero illiminato di forze in campa a un insieme certo molto grande ma communque calcolabile in un numero finito, anche se questo relativo sollievo ti viene insidiato dalle imboscate dei Libri Letti Tanto Tempo Fa Che Sarebbe Ora Di Rileggerli e dei Libri Che Hai Sempre Fatto Finta D'Averli Letti Mentre Sarebbe Ora Ti Decidessi A Leggerli Daverro
Ti liberi con rapidi zig zag e penetri d'un balzo nella cittadella delle Novita' Il Cui Autore O Argomento Ti Attrae. Anche all'interno di questa roccaforte puoi praticare delle brecce tra le schiere dei difensori dividendole in Novita' D'Autori O Argomenti Non Nuovie (per te o in assoluto) e Novita' D'Autori O Argomenti Completamente Sconosciuti (almeno a te) e definire l'attrattiva dogni di nuovo e di non nuovo (del nuovo che cerchi nel non nuovo e del non nuovo che cerchi nel nuovo).
Tutto questo per dire che, percorsi rapidamente con lo sguardo i titoli dei volumi esposti nella libreria, hai diretto i tuoi passi verso una pila di Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore freschi di stampa, ne hai afferrato una copia e l'hai portata alla cassa perche' venisse stabilato il tuo dirritto di proprieta' su di essa.
Hai gettato ancora un'occhiata smarrita ai libri intorno (o meglio: erano i libri che ti guardavano con l'aria smarrita dei cani che dalle gabbie del canile municipale vedono un loro ex compagno allontanarsi al guinzaglio del padrone venuto a riscattarlo), e sei uscito.
-Se una notte d'inverno, Italo Calvino

Woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum.
-Olympe de Gouges, The Declaration of the Rights of Woman

The orgasm of the past, whose ring she wore on her finger.
-"Vina Divina," Salman Rushdie

(Bloom passes. Cheap whores, singly, coupled, shawled, dishevelled, call from lanes, doors, corners.)
-Ulysses, James Joyce

"Now wait just a minute," Yasmin said to me after I told her all this about Monsieur Proust. "I'll be damned if i'm going to take on a bugger." "Why not?" "Don't be so stupid, Oswald. If he's a raging hundred percent fairy---" "We'll give him a double dose of the stuff." "That's not going to change his habits." "No," I said, "but it'll make him so bloody horny he won't even care what sex you are." "It's not going to work. If he's a genuine twenty-four carat homo, then all women are physically repulsive to him." "It's essential we get him," I said. "Our collection won't be complete without fifty Proust straws." Yasmin looked out the window. "If that's the case, there's only one thing." "What's that?" "You do it yourself. He wants a man, well, you're a man. You're perfect. You're young, beautiful, and lecherous." "Yes but I am not a catamite." "You don't have the guts?" "I can't cope with a man, Yasmin, you know that." "This isn't a man. It's a fairy." "For God's sake!" I cried. "I'll be damned if I let that little sod come near me! I'll have you know that even an enema gives me the shakes for a week!" Yasmin shrieked in laughter. "I suppose you're going to tell me that you have a small sphincter." "Yes, and I'm not having Mr. Proust enlarge it, thanks very much," I said. "You're a coward, Oswald," she said.
--My Uncle Oswald, Roald Dahl

Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say;
Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day;
The second best's a gay goodnight and a quickly turn away.
--From "Oedipus at Colonus," William Butler Yeates

A man in his own secret meditation
Is lost amid the labyrinth that he has made
In art or politics;
Some Platonist affirms that in the station
Where we should cast off body and trade
The ancient habit sticks,
And that if our works could
But vanish with our breath
That were a lucky death,
For triumph can but mar our solitude.
--From "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen," William Butler Yeates

To tell the truth, in art there are no problems --- for which the work of art is not the sufficient solution.
--Preface to The Immoralist, Andre' Gide

I had forgotten I was alone, forgotten the time, expecting nothing. It seemed to me that until this moment I had felt so little by virtue of thinking so much that I was astonished by a discovery: sensation was becoming as powerful as thoughts.
--The Immoralist, Andre' Gide

This was more than a convalescence---this was an increase, a recrudescence of life, the afflux of a richer, hotter blood which would touch my thoughts one by one, pneetrating everywhere, stirring, coloring the most remote, delicate and secret fibers of my being.For whether we are strong or weak we grow accustomed to our condition; the self, according to its powers, takes shape; but what if these powers should increase, if the should afford a wider scope, what if . . . ?
-The Immoralist, Andre' Gide

Perhaps this need to lie cost me something, at first: but I soon realized that what are supposedly the worst things (lying, to mention only one) are hard to do only when you have never done them; but that each of them becomes, and so quickly! easy, pleasant, sweet in the repetition, and soon a second nature. thus, as in each instance when an initial disgust is overcome, I ended by enjoying the dissimulation itself, savoring it as I savored the functioning of my unsuspected faculties. And i advanced every day into a richer, fuller life, toward a more delicious happiness.
-The Immoralist, Andre' Gide

But I think there comes a point in love, a unique moment which later on the soul seeks in vain to surpass, and that the effort to revive such happiness depletes it; that nothing thwarts happiness so much as the memory of happiness.
-The Immoralist, Andre' Gide

The loveliest creations of men are persistently painful. What would be the description of happiness? Nothing except what prepares and then waht destroys it can be told. ---And now I have told you all that had prepared it.
-The Immoralist, Andre' Gide

At first I hoped to find a more direct understanding of life in the novelists and poets I knew0---but if they possessed such a thing, they certainly kept it hidden; most of them, it seemed to me, did not live at all, were content with the appearance of life, and to them life itself seemed no more than a tiresome hindrance to writing. i could not blame them for this; nor do I assert that the mistake was not my own . . . Moreover, what did I mean by . . . living? ---That is precisely what I wanted them to tell me. ---The ones I met talked quite cleverly about life's various events, never about their causes.
As for the philosophers, whose role mit have been to instruct me, I had long known what to expect of them; mathematicians or neo-Kantians, they kept as far as possible from troublesome reality, and were no more concerned with life than the algebrist with the existence of the quantities he is measureing.
-The Immoralist, Andre' Gide

"you have to let other people be right," was his answer to their insults. "It consoles them for not being anything else."
-The Immoralist, Andre' Gide

"Are you afraid of getting drunk?"
"Oh, quite the contrary! I happen to regard sobriety as a more powerful intoxication---in which I keep my lucidity...I want an exaltation in my drunkenness, not a diminuition of life."
-The Immoralist, Andre' Gide

Neither of us spoke for some time. Menalque, who was walking up and down the room, absentmindedly lit a cigarette, then threw it away at once. "there is," he continued, "A 'sense,' the others would say, a 'sense' you seem to be lacking my dear Michel."
"You mean a 'moral sense,'"I said, trying to smile.
"No, just a sense of property."
"You don't seem to have much of one yourself."
"I have so little that nothing you see here beloongs to me; not even, or especially not, the bed I sleep on. I have a horror of comfort; posessions invite comfort, and in their se3cruity a man falls sleep; I love life enough to try to live wide awake, and so, even among all my treasures, I cherish a sense of the precarious, by which I provoke or at least arouse my life. I can't say I love danger, but I love a life of risk, I want life to demand of me, at every moment, all my courage, all my happiness, and all my health."
-The Immoralist, Andre' Gide

How lucky Menalque is, I thought, owning nothing! It's because I want to save things that I suffer. What does it all really matter?
-The Immoralist, Andre' Gide

I find a political significance in [my homage to Lacan]. I consider it an act of cultural resistance to pay homage publicaly to a difficult form of thought, discourse, or writing, one which does not submit easily to normalization by the media, by academics, or by publishers, one which rebels against the restoration currently underway, against the philosophical or theoretical neo-conformism in general (let us not even mention literature) that flattens and levels everything around us.
-"For the Love of Lacan," Jacques Derrida

There's a hole in your heart and it pierces right through me.
-The Medea, Euripides, courtesy of MCB

Eppure si muove.
(And yet, it moves.)
-Gallileo Gallilei, courtesy of MCB