“And here, almost against his will, he had to look at the face of the corpse. It was as it had been in life; no sign was visible of the promised redemption; what the others had found in the machine the officer had not found; the lips were firmly pressed together, the eyes were open, with the same expression as in life, their look was calm and convinced, through the forehead went the point of the great iron spike.”
(Kafka, quoted in Gabriel Josipovici’s Writing and the Body, p. 114.)
“Moreover, she seems to have had some worries about her health. After Leo’s departure, Gertrude moved to another house, on East Eager Street in Baltimore. Emma Lootz, a classmate at Johns Hopkins and a mutual friend of Mabel Weeks, had a room directly below Gertrude’s large living room. She recalled that Gertrude ‘got alarmed’ about the state of her own health, feeling that there was something wrong with her blood. Gertrude prescribed an unusual treatment for herself; she hired a welterweight to box with her. ‘The chandelier in my room used to swing,’ Emma Lootz remembered, ‘and the house echoed with shouts of ‘Now give me one on the jaw! Now give me one in the kidney!’ ”
(James R. Mellow, Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Company, pp. 44–45.)
“The thing is like this, it is all the question of identity. It is all a question of the outside being outside and the inside being inside. As long as the outside does not put a value on you it remain outside but when it does put a value on you then it gets inside or rather if the outside puts a value on you then all your inside gets to be outside. I used to tell all the men who were being successful young how bad this was for them and then I who was no longer young was having it happen. “
(Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography, p. 48)
“By infallible presentiment he saw, that now always doth life’s beginning gloom conclude in gladness; that wedding-bells peal not ever in the last scene of life’s fifth act; that while the countless tribes of common novels laboriously spin vails of mystery, only to complacently clear them up at last; and while the countless tribes of common dramas do but repeat the same; yet the profounder emanations of the human mind, intended to illustrate all that can be humanly known of human life; these never unravel their own intricacies, and have no proper endings; but in imperfect, unanticipated, and disappointing sequels (as mutilated stumps), hurry to abrupt intermergings with the eternal tides of time and fate.”
(Melville, Pierre, or the Ambiguities, Book VII, “Between Pierre’s Interviews with Isabel,” p. 141.)
“Great Expectations and Middlemarch can’t be done now. They don’t feel to me like the atmosphere I’m living in now. I’m with William Carlos Williams and Joyce and others; whatever I’m ‘saying’ I have to give the feeling of time now, the multiple disastrous world now, the world that came awfully and finally out of World War II. But Great Expectations and Middlemarch – they show people losing their true centers, going after money or status or displaced ideals, letting errors multiply, self-deception, self-punishment even. Great novels. I reread them. They move me. They add to me. I see how the whole thing works out (more maybe than any book can pretend to today) – but it is that whole process that adds to me, not an abstractable credo or assent. A novel isn’t a sermon or a moral program – excuse the truism. My step-grandfather, who came from Maine, thought the old copybook maxims were the way to teach you how to live. I thought about this, this conviction of his; but the fact that it was a conviction of his told me more than any of the actual maxims ever could.”
(Joseph McElroy, interview with Tom LeClair in Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists (1983), p. 246.)
“Desire, therefore, can be useful to the man of letters, first by keeping him at a distance from other men and from resembling them, then by restoring some movement to a spiritual machine which otherwise, beyond a certain age, tends to seize up. None of this makes us happy, but we can examine the reasons that keep us from being so, reasons which would have remained hidden from us if not for these sudden irruptions of disappointment. And dreams cannot be made real, we know that; still, perhaps we would not form any without desire, and it is useful to have dreams so that we can see their collapse and learn from it.”
(Proust, The Prisoner, trans. Carol Clark, p. 166.)
“That was all I had noticed, apart from a strongly modelled nose (very unusual in young girls), recalling the beak of a baby vulture.”
(Proust, The Prisoner, trans. Carol Clark, p. 124. Cf. the Moncrieff/Kilmartin version.)
“Or rather, wasn’t Françoise somehow enclosed within me, for distinctions between people and their interactions hardly exist in that sepia darkness where reality is no more translucent than in the body of a porcupine, and where our minimal perceptions can perhaps give an idea of those of certain animals?”
(Proust, The Prisoner, trans. Carol Clark, p. 109.)