“There is a great virtue in such an isolation. It permits a fair interval for thought. That is, what I call thinking, which is mainly scribbling. It has always been during the act of scribbling that I have gotten most of my satisfactions.”

(William Carlos Wiliiams, forward to The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams, unpaginated.)

“Knowing that work will never be finished is bad. Worse, nevertheless, is never-done work. The work that we do, at least, is left done. It may be poor, but it exists, like the miserable plant in the only pot my crippled neighbor has. The plant is her joy – sometimes it’s mine as well. What I write, and recognize to be bad, can also supply a few moments of distraction from worse things to one or another sorrowful or sad spirit. It’s enough for me, or it’s not enough, but in some way it’s useful, and that’s the way my whole life is.

A tedium that includes the anticipation of just more tedium; the grief, already, of grieving tomorrow for having grieved today – great, useless entanglements possessing no truth, great entanglements . . .

. . . where, huddled on a bench in the railway station, my disdain sleeps in the mantle of my despondency . . .

. . . the world of dreamed images that makes up both my understanding and my life . . .

The scruple of the present moment neither weighs on me nor lasts within me. I hunger to extend time, and I want to be myself without any conditions.”

(Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, from note 240 in Alfred Mac Adam’s translation, which is note 320 in Maria Aliete Galhoz & Teresa Sobral Cunha’s edition of the Livro do Desassossego.)

“I’m always horrified whenever I finish anything. Horrified and desolate. My instinct for perfection should inhibit me from ever finishing anything; it should in fact inhibit me from ever beginning. But I become distracted and do things. My accomplishments are not the product of my applied will but a giving away of my will. I begin because I don’t have the strength to think; I finish because I don’t have soul enough to stop things. This book is my cowardice.”

(Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, from note 151 in Alfred Mac Adam’s translation, which is note 190 in Maria Aliete Galhoz & Teresa Sobral Cunha’s edition of the Livro do Desassossego.)

“A day will come when, by means of similitude relayed indefinitely along the length of series, the image itself, along with the name it bears, will lose its identity. Campbell, Campbell, Campbell, Campbell.”

Michel Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, trans. James Harkness, p.54

“PK: The Guggenheim catalogue notes that your rope pieces of 1962–64 ‘reflect a boyhood interest in the art of tying knots.’ Can you tell us anything more about this interest, and its retrospective meaning for you?

RM: I grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Kansas City which was not always the gentlest of environments. I had joined the Boy Scout group that met at our grade school, Graceland, on 51st and Montgall, on Tuesday evenings. At the second meeting I attended, on a balmy early September evening, the older scouts mutinied (I never knew why) and threw Mr. Garrett, the scoutmaster, down a flight of stairs and out into the school yard. The scout troop was dissolved. As I had been in the Cub Scouts (without any violent incidents occurring) and had made a knot board – oval in design with the basic knots tied in 3/8-inch hemp rope and carefully tacked to the shellacked board – I had looked forward to the Boy Scouts as a place primarily to tie advanced knots. I had hoped one day to achieve a mastery approaching my father’s magic with splices and double sheet bends. This was not to be. Shortly after I finished high school my mother revealed to me that in cleaning out the old chicken house she had discarded my Cub Scout oval knot board. Now the living record of even my basic, primitive knot knowledge was erased. Frustration. Loss. The return of the repressed, etc., etc.”

(Robert Morris, interviewed by Pepe Karmel in Art in America, June 1995.

“Why is it that from time to time I expound contradictory and irreconcilable processes for dreaming and learning how to dream? Probably because I am so used to seeing false things as if they were true, dreamed things as vividly as if I’d really seen them, I’ve lost the human distinction (false, I think) between truth and lies.

All I have to do is see or hear (or perceive with any other sense) a thing clearly to feel it to be real. It may well be that I feel two things that cannot exist at the same time. It doesn’t matter.

There are creatures who suffer for hours and hours because they cannot be the figures in paintings or on playing cards. There are souls on whom not being able to be people from the Middle Ages weighs like a malediction. I’ve had that problem. But not today. I’ve gone beyond it. But it does pain me, for example, not to be able to dream of two kings in different kingdoms belonging, for example, to universes with different kinds of space and time. Not having achieved this truly saddens me. It’s like going hungry.

To be able to dream inconceivable things by making them visible is one of the great triumphs that even I, great as I am, only rarely attain. Yes, dreaming that I am, for example, simultaneously, separately, unconfusedly, a man and a woman taking a walk along a riverbank. To see myself, at the same time, with equal clarity, in the same way, with no mixing, being the two things, integrated equally in both, a conscious boat in a southern sea and a printed page in an ancient book. How absurd this seems! But everything is absurd, and the dream is the least of the absurdities.”

(Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, from note 21 in Alfred Mac Adam’s translation, which is note 32 in Maria Aliete Galhoz & Teresa Sobral Cunha’s edition of the Livro do Desassossego.)