The novel is the place you go to have all your certainties dissolved. You should come away from a novel knowing nothing.
Howard Jacobson on the BBC World Book Club, May 19, 2012.
To counteract the nonsense of video games and their industry in my life, here I primarily focus on books.
Posts tagged quotations
Posted 2 weeks ago
6 Notes
Posted 1 month ago
4 Notes
Sometimes I can feel my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.
Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005)
Posted 1 month ago
2 Notes
Art is that thing having to do only with itself. Unfortunately, there are no examples of art, nor good reasons to think that it will ever exist.
Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated (2002)
Posted 1 month ago
11 Notes
There are only so many times you can utter ‘It does not hurt’ before it begins to hurt even more than the hurt. You become enlightened of the feeling of being hurt, which is worse, I am certain, than the existent hurt.
Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated (2002)
Posted 2 months ago
2 Notes
St. Patrick of Armagh, deliver me from writing.
Anonymous medieval scribe writing in the margins of an illuminated manuscript he was assigned to copy (source: Lapham’s Quarterly)
Posted 2 months ago
9 Notes
It’s the hardest addiction of all…Forget heroin. Just try giving up irony, that deep-down need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning.
Edward St. Aubyn, At Last (2011)
Posted 2 months ago
3 Notes
Faith, the least exclusive club on earth, has the craftiest doorman.
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (2010)
Posted 2 months ago
5 Notes
The magic of books, and the reason I think books are more intimate than any other art form, and will ultimately survive email and Facebook and Twitter and whatever else, is that they make the reader complicit in their creation. I don’t think a book is ever ‘received.’
Jonathan Safran Foer on the BBC World Book Club, March 3, 2012.
Posted 4 months ago
4 Notes
This may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.
Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (2011). I find that at this stage in my life I regularly engage in both of these exercises.
Posted 4 months ago
12 Notes
History isn’t the lies of the victors…I know that now. It’s more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated.
Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (2011)
