MEMORABLE QUOTES:
"There are intervals, but they are between dreams, and there is no consciousness of them left."
"I have moved the typewriter into the next room where I can see myself in the mirror as I write."
"Indigo sky swept clear of fleecy clouds, gaunt trees infinitely extended, their black boughs gesticulating like a sleepwalker."
"We have so many points in common that it is like looking at myself in a cracked mirror."
"I am crying for more and more disasters, for bigger calamities, for grander failures. I want the whole world to be out of whack, I want everyone to scratch himself to death."
"It is to be a new Bible--
The Last Book. All those who have anything to say will say it here--
anonymously. We will exhaust the age."
"A cathedral, a veritable cathedral, in the building of which everybody will assist who has lost his identity."
"Your nearness is the nearness of planets."
"A man cut in slices...You can't imagine how furious I am not to have thought of a title like that!"
"a clump of decrepit buildings which have so rotted away that they have collapsed on one another and formed a sort of intestinal embrace"
"The people who live here are dead; they make chairs which other people sit on in their dreams."
"An artist is always alone--if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness."
"The rain had stopped and the sun breaking through the clouds touched the glistening rubble of roofs soapy with a cold fire."
"I try to focus but the music is too slippery. I can think of nothing but a vase, slowly turning and the figures dropping off into space. Finally there is only light turning, and how does light turn, I ask myself."
"a vast jumble of architecture, staggering in beauty and at the same time monstrous, hideously monstrous because the fecundity which seethes and ferments in the myriad ramifications of design seem to have exhausted the very soil of India itself."
"When he finds God, as it were, he has been picked clean: he is a skeleton. One must burrow into life again in order to put on flesh. The word must become flesh; the soul thirsts." (98)
"I call him Joe because he calls me Joe. When Carl is with us he is Joe too. Everybody is Joe because it's easier that way. It's also a pleasant reminder not to take yourself too seriously." (102)
"When he says this I have the impression that the whole world is wrapped up there inside his belly, and that it's rotting there." (103)
"They look so absolutely peaceful and contented, as if they had been dozing there for years, that suddenly it seems to me as if we had been standing in this room, in exactly this position, for an incalculably long time, that it was a pose we had struck in a dream from which we never emerged, a dream which the least gesture, the wink of an eye even, will shatter." (126)
"And the further off he wanders the more lugubrious is his distress; he wears it like a lantern which the cyclists hold between their teeth on a night when the pavement is wet and slippery." (127)
"And so, instead of tackling his book, he reads one author after another in order to make absolutely certain that he is not going to tread on their private property." (132)
"The world is brought right under my nose and all that is requested of me is to punctuate the calamities." (146)
"They have a wonderful therapeutic effect upon me, these catastrophes which I proofread. Imagine a state of perfect immunity, a charmed existence, a life of absolute security in the midst of poison bacilli." (147)
"When the world blows up and the final edition has gone to press the proofreaders will quietly gather up all commas, semicolons, hyphens, asterisks, brackets, parentheses, periods, exclamation marks, etc. and put them in a little box over the editorial chair." (147)
