“Indeed nothing is more painful than this contrast between the mutability of people and the fixity of memory.” (Proust, Time Regained)

“The real love object is constantly changing, and one can love you today only by betraying the person you were yesterday.” — Krzhizhanovsky, “In the Pupil” (tr. Joanne Turnbull)

“Ah, but we die to each other daily. What we know of other people Is only our memory of the moments During which we knew them. . . . . . . We must also remember That at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.” (T. S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party)

Marcel Proust: “Every person is destroyed when we stop seeing them; the person’s next appearance is a new creation, different from the one that had immediately preceded it, if not from all previous appearances. (1/2)

“So it is that a well-read man immediately starts yawning with boredom when someone talks to him about the latest ‘great book,’ because he imagines a sort of composite of all the great books he’s read...” — Proust, In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom 🌸 (trans. by @avecsesdoigts.bsky.social)

“Life forms a surface that acts as if it could not be otherwise, but under its skin things are pounding and pulsing.” (Musil, The Man without Qualities)

“A man matters, his experiences matter, but in the city, where experiences come by the thousands, we can no longer relate them to ourselves; and this is of course the beginning of life’s notorious turning into abstraction.” — Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities (tr. Wilkins and Pike)

“. . . More than ever, the things we can live with are falling away, and imageless action’s usurping their place.” — Rilke, Duino Elegies (9th Elegy), trans. Gass

“. . . Mehr als je fallen die Dinge dahin, die erlebbaren, denn, was sie verdrängend ersetzt, ist ein Tun ohne Bild.” — Rilke, Duineser Elegien (9. Elegie)

“That the past and the future may become contemporary within a being—this is the possibility that reading books offers.” — Pascal Quignard, Petits traités II

“Death is like language. Death is a machine for obliterating conditions of appearance. Death, like language, brings the unseeable with it. More than this, it brings with it the *unforeseeable*.” — Pascal Quignard, The Silent Crossing

“L’homme est l’espèce animale à deux mondes : vivants et morts.” “Dès qu’il y a langage, il y a deux mondes : signifiant en même temps que signifié, présent et absent, oui et non, jour et nuit, printemps et automne, etc.” — Pascal Quignard, Vie secrète

“The human being is the animal species of two worlds: the living and the dead.” “Once language exists, there are two worlds: signifier and signified at once, present and absent, yes and no, day and night, spring and autumn, and so on.” — Pascal Quignard, Vie secrète

“The past is a new organ which ensues from the language that is taught to the newborn. When combined with the written page, it opens up a new space we call history.” — Pascal Quignard, The Fount of Time (tr. Chris Turner)

Proust on Chateaubriand: “I like reading Chateaubriand because by giving us to hear every two or three pages (just as after an interval of silence on summer nights one hears the two notes, always the same, that make up the song of the owl) his own particular call, (1/2)

“Quelquefois une haute colonne se montrait seule debout dans un désert, comme une grande pensée s’élève par intervalles dans une âme que le temps et le malheur ont dévastée.” — Chateaubriand, René (yesterday’s in-flight reading)

“Sometimes a tall column rose up solitary in a waste land, as a great thought may spring from a soul ravaged by time and sorrow.” — Chateaubriand, René (tr. Irving Putter)

“Our heart is a defective instrument, a lyre with several chords missing, which forces us to express our joyful moods in notes meant for lamentation.” — Chateaubriand, René (tr. Irving Putter)

“But he seemed alone, absolutely alone in the universe. A bit of wreck in the mid Atlantic.” — from “Bartleby, the Scrivener” #MelvilleMonday 🐳

“Poetry = practice of subtlety in a barbaric world. Whence the need to fight for poetry *today*: Poetry should be one of our ‘Human Rights’; it isn’t ‘decadent,’ it’s subversive: subversive and vital.” — Roland Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel (tr. Kate Briggs)

I write to be loved: by a few, but *from a distance*. — Roland Barthes from The Preparation of the Novel (lecture of December 15, 1979)

Walter Benjamin in a letter (1917): “Correspondence is the only possible form of expression for many things, due to its different premises which, to a certain degree, always allow and vouchsafe the writer’s suffering and pathos.” (trans. M. R. Jacobson et al.)

“Purity can only be represented in impurity…” — Hölderlin (letter to Neuffer, 1798) (trans. Charlie Louth)

Currently reading (ebook version)

Hölderlin to Hegel (July 10, 1794): “I am certain you will have thought of me from time to time since we parted with the watchword ‘Kingdom of God!’ [their shared Tübingen-era ideal] By that watchword we would, I believe, recognize each other after every possible metamorphosis.” (1/2)

Why in fact did I come to write, why do I write books? *Out of opposition to myself, suddenly*, and against this condition—because to me, as I’ve said, resistance is *everything*… I wanted exactly this tremendous resistance, and that’s why I write prose… — Thomas Bernhard, Three Days (tr. Lindgren)

Some books won’t let you go. the copy I kept from my mom 🖤 and the newer Folio edition I picked up a while back

"Yellowed pages?! But I bought it recently!", he thought, before realizing that he had purchased the book 34 YEARS AGO.

“Desire is the beginning of Truth. The first half. […] Believing is the flesh of truth.” — Hélène Cixous, First Days of the Year

“Presence and absence are my wings. Impossible to separate myself from them. To transcribe my life, with one leap, invisible to myself: to be not altogether what I think I am, to escape way up there, to the last leaf, at the limit of the species.” — Cixous, First Days of the Year (tr. MacGillivray)

“If absence does not allow itself to be reduced by the letter, this is so because it is the letter’s ether and respiration.” — Jaques Derrida, “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book,” in WD

“All letters give form to absence. Hence, God is the child of His Name.” — Edmond Jabès, “The Book of the Absent,” in BQ

Clarice Lispector in a letter: “You need to know that you already are a writer… What I wish for you is to be known and admired only by a delicate but large group of people spread across the world. I hope that you never attain cruel popularity because [it] invades the sacred intimacy of our hearts.”

“Fame is a form of incomprehension, perhaps the worst.” — A passage from Borges came to mind: (“Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” tr. James E. Irby)

“Fame” by Jorge Luis Borges (trans. Alastair Reid)

“It’s quite lovely, don’t you think,” Swann said, “that sound can reflect things, like water, or a mirror.” — Proust, In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom 🌸 (trans. by @avecsesdoigts.bsky.social)

“Music is the mirror of what is lost.” — Pascal Quignard, Abysses (trans. Chris Turner)

“But you’ve had too much Marcel.” 😂 (from Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor)

“In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. … And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity…” — Proust, Time Regained (tr. Scott Moncrieff et al.)

“The character of *the reader* is a strange and curious one. While being entirely individual and with his or her own reactions, the reader is so intimately linked with the writer that the truth is that the reader *is* the writer.” — Clarice Lispector (Feb. 1968)

“Making a book could mean exchanging the ‘void of writing’ for ‘writing the void.’ . . . Writing is the dawning solitude of the letter.” — Edmond Jabès (“Letter from Yukel to Sarah,” The Book of Margins, tr. Waldrop)

Last night 🖤

“A bit of light still filters through the words.” — Blanchot, L’attente L’oubli

“The pages of the book are doors. Words go through them, driven by their impatience to regroup, to reach the end of the work, to be again transparent. Ink fixes the memory of words to the paper. Light is in their absence, which you read.” — Jabès, The Book of Questions

“There is something divine in books. […] A book is supple, untrammeled. A book is not a crust. It is a ball of light. The filthiest of books, the thickest of books, a ball of light. Pure. Soulful. Divine. Self-abandoning.” — Henri Michaux, A Certain Plume (tr. Richard Sieburth)

“There is no single self. There are not ten selves. There is no self. SELF is but a point of equilibrium. (One among a thousand others, always possible, always at the ready.) An averaged ‘self,’ a crowd movement. In the name of the many, I sign this book.” — Henri Michaux

Pascal Quignard (dans le petit traité intitulé “1640”): “Il faut vivre le présent comme la ruine qu’il prépare. Il faut découvrir le présent comme une ruine dont on recherche le trésor.”

Walter Benjamin: “If it can be said that for Baudelaire modern life is the reservoir of dialectical images, this implies that he stood in the same relation to modern life as the seventeenth century did to antiquity.” (from “Central Park,” trans. Jephcott and Eiland)

“To be exiled is not to disappear but to shrink, to slowly or quickly get smaller and smaller until we reach our real height, the true height of the self. […] All literature carries exile within it.” — Roberto Bolaño (“Exiles,” Between Parentheses)

“I have a profound respect for humanity. An enormous respect for life. I believe in men. Even the con artists. I try to develop a sense of identification with the rest of humanity. I don’t swim in a pool if I have the sea.” — Clarice Lispector, Too Much of Life