"I'd like to write something that comes from things the way wine comes from grapes."
Walter Benjamin, On Hashish. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006: p. 69.
69.
"Not so long ago, the Church of England used to pray on Good Friday for God's mercy on the Turks and that all ignorance and hardness of heart be taken from them..."
Richard Clogg, "Between Love and Hate: the empty spaces where Greeks once were" (Review of Speros Vryonis, Jr. The mechanism of catastrophe and Samim Akgönül Les grecs de Turquie). TLS December 2, 2005, p. 3.
"... For being a foreigner, Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy - a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an ongoing responsibility, a paranthesis in what had once been ordinary life, only to discover that that previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding. Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect."
Jhumpa Lahiri, Namesake (2003) p. 49.
"Don't grunt" said Alice, "that's not at all a proper way of expressing yourself."
(Holding and speaking to the baby pig of the Duchess).
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865).
"Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash."
Leonard Cohen
"The room (in the Central Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths) is arranged, naturally enough, according to a hierarchy, but since, as one would expect, it is harmonious from that point of view, it is also harmonious from the geometrical point of view, which just goes to show that there is no insurmountable contradiction between aesthetics and authority."
José Saramago, Todos os Nomes (All the Names)
If my enemy's alone and his arms are empty,
give him my heart silk-wrapped like a child by exiles
Agha Shahid Ali, Call me Ishmael tonight: a book of ghazals (2003)
No one who has never eaten a food to excess has ever really experienced it, or fully exposed himself to it.
Walter Benjamin, "Fresh Figs" in Frankfurter Zeitung, May 1930.
In the years since the phrase became cliché, I have received any number of compliments for my supposed ability to "think outside the box." Actually, it has been a struggle for me to perceive just what those "boxes" were -why they were there, why other people regarded them as important, where their borderlines might be, how to live safely within and without them. My efforts have been only partly successful: after fifty-two years, I am left with the melancholy sensation that my life has been spent in a perpetual state of parallel play, alongside, but distinctly apart from, the rest of humanity."
Tim Page, "Parallel Play," The New Yorker August 20, 2007: p. 36.
"One could say that, in its world-forming capacity, architecture transforms geological time into human time, which is another way of saying it turns matter into meaning. That is why the sight of ruins is such a reflexive and in some cases an unsettling experience. Ruins in an advanced state of ruination represent, or better they literally embody, the dissolution of meaning into matter. By revealing what human building ultimately is up against -natural or geological time- ruins have a way of recalling us to the very ground of our human worlds, namely the earth, whose foundations are so solid and so reliable that they presumably will outlast any edifices that we build on them."
Robert Pogue Harrison, The dominion of the dead 2003: p. 3.
