I know there are readers in the world, as well as many other good people in it, who are no readers at all,—who find themselves ill at ease, unless they are let into the whole secret from first to last, of every thing which concerns you. Tristam Shandy, Ch. 4
Here the sun grew dark. And Eorcenbehrt, king of the inhabitants of Kent, passed away. And Colman with his companions went to his native land. The same year there was a great plague among men… Here Theodore was ordained archbishop. Here King Egbert gave Reculver to Bass the mass-priest in which to build a minster… Here there was a great mortality of birds. (anon., 7th cent chronicle)
It had never occurred to him until then to think that literature was the best plaything that had ever been invented to make fun of people, as Alvaro demonstrated during one night of revels.
P 394 100 Years of Solitude, GG Marquez
Human life can be compared to a person dancing in a variety of forms around his own self:…Another thing we are not supposed to do is explain the inexplicable. Men have learned to live with a black burden, a huge aching hum: the supposition that “reality” may be only a “dream”. How much more dreadful it would be if the very awareness of our being aware of reality’s dreamlike nature were also a dream, a built-in hallucination!
P 93, Transparent Things, Nabokov
So one’s own free, unrestrained choice, one’s own whim, be it the wildest, one’s own fancy, sometimes worked up to a frenzy – that is the most advantageous advantage that cannot be fitted into any table or scale and that causes every system and every theory to crumble into dust on contact. And where did these sages pick up the notion that man must have something that they feel is an normal and virtuous set of wishes/what makes him think that man’s will must be reasonable and in accordance with his own interests? All man actually needs is independent will, at all costs and whatever the consequences.
Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Der Sinn für die Darstellung meines traumhaften inneres Lebens hat alles andere ins Nebensächliche gerückt und es ist einer schrecklichen Weise verkümmert und hört nicht auf zu verkümmern. Nichts anders kann mich jemals zufrieden stellen.
Franz Kafka, Traüme
