I’ve always said that I learned the English I know through two sources – Marvel Comics and Finnegans Wake.
There are four types: the cretin, the imbecile, the stupid and the mad. Normality is a balanced mixture of all four.
A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection – not an invitation for hypnosis.
The truth is an anagram of an anagram.
Is it worth it to be born if you cannot remember it later? And, technically speaking, had I ever been born? Other people, of course, said that I was. As far as I know, I was born in late April, at sixty years of age, in a hospital room.
New Orleans is not in the grip of a neurosis of a denied past; it passes out memories generously like a great lord; it doesn’t have to pursue “the real thing.”
But it has often happened that I have found the most seductive depictions of sin in the pages of those very men of incorruptible virtue who condemned their spell and their effects.
What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible.
What we honor as prudence in our elders is simply panic in action.
In other words, although I don’t like them, we do need noble-spirited souls.
The followers must feel besieged.
I am a professor who writes novels on Sundays.
I enjoyed your article, but I preferred my own.
Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.
Losers, like autodidacts, always know much more than winners. If you want to win, you need to know just one thing and not to waste your time on anything else: the pleasures of erudition are reserved for losers. The more a person knows, the more things have gone wrong.
There, Master Niketas,’ Baudolino said, ‘when I was not prey to the temptations of this world, I devoted my nights to imagining other worlds. A bit with the help of wine, and a bit with that of the green honey. There is nothing better than imagining other worlds,’ he said, ’to forget the painful one we live in. At least so I thought then. I hadn’t yet realized that, imagining other worlds, you end up changing this one.
Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It’s the invasion of the idiots.
We stopped to browse in the cases, and now that William – with his new glasses on his nose – could linger and read the books, at every title he discovered he let out exclamations of happiness, either because he knew the work, or because he had been seeking it for a long time, or finally because he had never heard it mentioned and was highly excited and titillated. In short, for him every book was like a fabulous animal that he was meeting in a strange land.
I should be at peace. I have understood. Don’t some say that peace comes when you understand? I have understood. I should be at peace. Who said that peace derives from the contemplation of order, order understood, enjoyed, realized without residuum, in joy and truimph, the end of effort? All is clear, limpid; the eye rests on the whole and on the parts and sees how the parts have conspired to make the whole; it perceives the center where the lymph flows, the breath, the root of the whys...
The person who doesn’t read lives only one life. The reader lives 5,000. Reading is immortality backwards.