"What does it mean to be worth something? Or worth enough? Or worthless? What does it mean to earn a living? What does it mean to be hired? What does it mean to be let go? [...] As I empty the bags and touch the moss, and the leaves, and the twigs, and the berries, and a robin-blue eggshell, I consider how much we depend on useless, arbitrary tasks to prove ourselves. I consider how much we depend on these tasks so we can say, at the very end, we succeeded. [...] Our criteria for earning a life, a living, is mutating like a virus that wants badly to stay alive."
Here
"It was the dead heat of Paris summer, when Paris cats go to sleep on Paris windowsills, and ledges high up, and fall off, and plunge through the glass roof of the lavabo. The center of the city was empty. A sight-seeing bus set off from the Place de l'Opéra. A truck and a Citroën smashed before the Galeries Lafayette. At the Pont d'Auteuil, a man's body was dragged out of the Seine with a bicycle tied to it. Among the fixtures, tiled and marbled shapes remindful of a large outdoor bathroom, in the cemetery at Montrouge a widower argued with his dead wive's lover over who had the right to place flowers on her grave. In front of the Bourse, a deaf-mute soccer team carried on conversation in obstreperous silence. On the Quai du Pont Neuf, a Frenchman sat picking his nose. Then he put his arm around his girl and kissed her. Then he picked his nose. It was Sunday in Paris, and very quiet."
The Recognitions, William Gaddis, pg 74
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| Here |
"The Recognitions as a title I like perfectly because it implies the impossibility of escape from a (the) pattern". — William Gaddis
"Gwyon had climbed to the pines behind the town, pausing to breathe and smell the delicious freshness of manure, to realize how his senses had fallen into disuse under the abuses of cities".
[pg16]
[...]
"— Then how can you judge her crime, if you have never been so tempted?"
[pg24]
[...]
"And his father, withdrawing into his study with a deftness for absenting himself at crucial moments akin to that talent of the Lord, had become about as unattainable".
[pg35]
[...]
"Prolonged hours of wakefulness, when all he sought was sleep, might turn out to have been sleep when he waked: but most unsupportable was the sensational affair which went something like this: consciousness, it seemed, was a succession of separate particles, being carried along on the surface of the deep and steady unconscious flow of life, of time itself, and in fainting, the particles of consciousness simply stopped, and the rest flowed on, until they were restored: but this was stoppage, the entire disappearance of that deeper flow which left the particles of consciousness suspended, piling up, ready any instant to shatter with nothing to support them. Still, at such times everything was in order, of shape and color to mass and distance, of minutes accomplishing hours by accumulation just as the clock itself stayed on the table where it was if only because it had been accumulating there for so long: that was the reassurance of weight".
[pg51]
[...]
"It was done in black on a smooth gesso ground, on strong linen, a stark likeness which left its lines of completion to the eye of the beholder. It was this quality which appeared to upset Gwyon: once he'd seen it he was constantly curious, and would stand looking away from it, and back, completing it in his own mind and then looking again as though, in the momentary absence of his stare and the force of his own plastic imagination, it might have completed itself. Still each time he returned to it,it was slightly different than he remembered, intractably thwarting the completion he had managed himself.
— Why won't you finish it? he burst out finally.
— There's something about a ... an unfinished piece of work, a ... a thing like this where ... do you see? Where perfection is still possible? Because it's there all the time, all the time you work trying to uncover it. Wyatt caught a hand before him and gripped it as his father's were gripped behind the back turned to him. — Because it's there ..., he repeated."
[pg57]
"The anti-nuclear movement to which I once belonged has misled the world about the impacts of radiation on human health. The claims we have made are ungrounded in science, unsupportable when challenged and wildly wrong. We have done other people, and ourselves, a terrible disservice."
Here
Why I changed my mind about nuclear power | Michael Shellenberger | TEDxBerlin
"— Lucifer is the morning star, he began hopefully, — Father says...
— Father says! ... her voice cut him through. — Lucifer was the archangel who refused to serve Our Lord. To sin is to falsify something in the Divine Order, and that is what Lucifer did. His name means Bringer of Light but he was not satisfied to bring the light of Our Lord to man, he tried to steal the power of Our Lord and to bring his own light to man. He tried to become original, she pronounced malignantly, shaping that word round the whole structure of damnation, repeating it, crumpling the drawing of the robin in her hand, — original, to steal Our Lord's authority, to command his own destiny, to bear his own light! That is why Satan is The Fallen Angel, for he rebelled when he tried to emulate Our Lord Jesus. And he won his own domain, didn't he. Didn't he! And his own light is the light of the fires of Hell! Is that what you want? Is that what you want?"
The Recognitions, William Gaddis [pg 34]
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| Wings of Desire, Wim Wenders |
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| Jorge de Burgos, The Name of the Rose |
"This staunchless wound, the great longing for another place.
To make this place another.
In a mosque at Damietta stands a column that, if you lick it until your tongue bleeds, will cure you of restlessness. It must bleed.
A curious word, wanderlust. I'm ready to go."
Unguided Tour, Susan Sontag
