Montaigne’s constant scrutiny of his urine in a chamber pot, his colics and dizzy spells, his ability to drink heroic amounts of hot sulfurous water, locate his journal in a time when the body was still part of personality. Later, it would disappear. Dickens’ characters, for instance, have no kidney stones because they have no kidneys. From Smollett to Ulysses, there is not a kidney in English literature.

-Guy Davenport, ‘Montaigne’

The art historians are the real wreckers of art, Reger said. The art historians twaddle so long about art until they have killed it with their twaddle. Art is killed by the twaddle of the art historians. My God, I often think, sitting here on the settee while the art historians are driving their helpless flocks past me, what a pity about all these people who have all art driven out of them, driven out of them for good, by these very art historians. The art historians’ trade is the vilest trade there is, and a twaddling art historian, but then there are only twaddling art historians, deserves to be chased out with a whip, chased out of the world of art, Reger said, all art historians deserve to be chased out of the world of art, because art historians are the real wreckers of art and we should not allow art to be wrecked by the art historians who are really art wreckers. Listening to an art historian we feel sick, he said, by listening to an art historian we see the art he is twaddling about being ruined, with the twaddle of the art historian art shrivels and is ruined. Thousands, indeed tens of thousands of art historians wreck art by their twaddle and ruin it, he said. The art historians are the real killers of art, if we listen to an art historian we participate in the wrecking of art, wherever an art historian appears art is wrecked, that is the truth.

-Thomas Bernhard, Old Masters

(Geography: that paucity of invention, that fatuous faith in distance of man, who can invent no better means than geography for escaping; himself of all, to whom, so he believed he believed, geography had never been merely something to walk upon but was the very medium which the fetterless to- and fro-going required to breathe in.)

-William Faulkner, The Hamlet

and if it is still possible at this late hour to conceive of other worlds

as just as ours but less exquisitely organized

one perhaps there is one perhaps somewhere merciful enough to shelter such frolics where no one ever abandons anyone and no one ever waits for anyone and never two bodies touch

and if it may seem strange that without food to sustain us we can drag ourselves thus by the mere grace of our united net sufferings from west to east towards an inexistent peace we are invited kindly to consider

that for the likes of us and no matter how we are recounted there is more nourishment in a cry nay a sigh torn from one whose only good is silence or in speech extorted from one at last delivered from its use than sardines can ever offer

-Samuel Beckett, How It Is

at the end of the myriad of hours an hour mine a quarter of an hour there are moments it’s because I have suffered must have suffered morally hoped more than once despaired to match your heart bleeds you lose your heart drop by drop weep even an odd tear inward no sound no more images no more journeys no more hunger or thirst the heart is going you’ll soon be there I hear it there are moments they are good memories

-Samuel Beckett, How It Is

Well then, are we to speak always about Bosquet’s wound, about Fitzgerald’s and Lowry’s alcoholism, Nietzsche and Artaud’s madness while remaining on the shore? Are we to become the professionals who give talks on these topics? Are we to wish only that those who have been struck down do not abuse themselves too much? Are we to take up collections and create special journal issues? Or should we go a short way further to see for ourselves, be a little alcoholic, a little crazy, a little suicidal, a little of a guerilla—just enough to extend the crack, but not enough to deepen it irremediably? Wherever we turn, everything seems dismal. Indeed, how are we to stay at the surface, without staying on the shore?

-Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations (trans. Martin Joughin)

    In writing this story, I shall yield to emotion and I know perfectly well that every day is one more day stolen from death. In no sense an intellectual, I write with my body. And what I write is like a dank haze. The words are sounds transfused with shadows that intersect unevenly, stalactites, woven lace, transposed organ music. I can scarcely invoke the words to describe this pattern, vibrant and rich, morbid and obscure, its counterpoint the deep bass of sorrow. Allegro con brio.I shall attempt to extract gold from charcoal. I know that I am holding up the narrative and playing at ball without a ball. Is the fact an act? I swear that this book is composed without words: like a mute photograph. This book is a silence: an interrogation.

-Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star (trans. Giovanni Pontiero)

"Silence alone is my prayer, oh Lord, and I can say no more; I am so happy feeling that I silence myself to feel even more; it was in silence that a spider’s subtle and fragile web formed inside me: this sweet ignorance of life which allows me to live."

Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart  (via human-activities)

"If we are free—available—and without faith, our aspirations escape from us, as light does from the sun, and, like light, can flee to infinity, for the physical or metaphysical sky is not a ceiling. The sky of religion is a ceiling. It ends the world. It is a ceiling and screen, since, in escaping from my heart, the aspirations are not lost; they are revealed against the sky, and I, thinking myself lost, find myself in them or in the images of them projected on the ceiling. Abhorring the infinite, religions imprison us in a universe as limited as the universe of prison—but as unlimited, for our hope in it lights up perspectives just as sudden, reveals gardens just as fresh, characters just as monstrous, deserts, fountains; and our more ardent love, drawing greater richness from the heart, projects them on the thick walls; and this heart is sometimes explored so minutely that a secret chamber is breached and allows a ray to slip through, to alight on the door of a cell and to show God."

Saint Genet, Miracle of the Rose (via lovevoltaireusapart)

"The Yamana … had fifteen names for clouds and more than fifty for different kinds/ of kin. Among their variations of the verb/ ‘to bite’ was a word that meant ‘to come surprisingly on a hard substance/ when eating something soft/ e.g. a pearl in a mussel."

Qtd. in Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson (1998)