“. . . remember that there is no language more difficult to write than English. In the long history of our literature it would be difficult to find more than six persons who have written it faultlessly.”
(Somerset Maugham, preface to The Gentleman in the Parlour, p. ix.)
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“It is not that people today are wicked or stupid; they are simply deaf. The thundering of the machine they have set in motion and which carries them toward the precipice is so loud that the far-off cries of those who have been excluded by the machine because they hold no ticket never reach the deafened ears of that joyous assemblage.”
(Pier Paolo Pasolini, “The End of a Post-War Era,” originally in La libertà d’Italia, 6 October 1950; p. 140 in Stories from the City of God: Sketches and Chronicles of Rome, 1950–1966, trans. Marina Harss.)
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“The names of the brothers are a matched pair of opposites. Abel comes from the Hebrew ‘hebel‘, meaning ‘breath’ or ‘vapour’: anything that lives and moves and is transient, including his own life. The root of ‘Cain’ appears to be the verb ‘kanah‘: to ‘acquire’, ‘get’, ‘own property’, and so ‘rule’ or ‘subjugate’.
‘Cain’ also means ‘metal-smith’. And since, in several languages – even Chinese – the words for ‘violence’ and ‘subjugation’ are linked to the discovery of metal, it is perhaps the destiny of Cain and his descendants to practise the black arts of technology.”
(Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines, p. 193.)
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“Rereading, an operation contrary to the commercial and ideological habits of our society, which would have us ‘throw away’ the story once it has been consumed (‘devoured’), so that we can then move on to another story, but another book, and which is tolerated only in certain marginal categories of readers (children, old people, and professors), rereading is here suggested at the outset, for it alone saves the text from repetition (those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere), multiplies it in its variety and its plurality: rereading draws the text out of its internal chronology (‘this happens before or after that’) and recaptures a mythic time (without before or after); it contests the claim which would have us believe that the first reading is a primary, naïve, phenomenal reading which we will only, afterwards, have to ‘explicate,’ to intellectualize (as if there were a beginning of reading, as if everything were not already read: there is no first reading, even if the text is concerned to give us that illusion by several operations of suspense, artifices more spectacular than persuasive); rereading is no longer consumption but play (that play which is the return of the different). If then, a deliberate contradiction in terms, we immediately reread the text, it is in order to obtain, as though under the effect of a drug (that of recommencement, of difference), not the real text, but a plural text: the same and new.”
(Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller, pp. 15–16.)