quoth the madman

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
— Franz Kafka

literacki

Works of art can fail so easily, it is so difficult for them to succeed. One man will fall silent because of his lack of feeling; another, because his emotion chokes him. A third frees himself, not from the burden that weighs on him, but only from a feeling of unfreedom. A fourth breaks his tools because they have too long been used to exploit him. The world is not obliged to be sentimental. Defeats should be acknowledged; but one should not conclude from them that there should be no more struggles.

Bertolt Brecht, from  Against Georg Lukacs

quoth the madman

During the long years in which I have been working at the problems of the neuroses I have often been in doubt and sometimes been shaken in my convictions.
At such times it has always been the Interpretation of Dreams that has given me back my certainty.

Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation Of Dreams, Preface to the Second Edition

quoth the madman

Nature does not produce on the one side owners of money or commodities, and on the other men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no natural basis, neither is its social basis one that is common to all historical periods.
Karl Marx - Capital Vol 1 Ch 6 1867

ponderous

 

"There is really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’, there is only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard"

Arundhati Roy

literacki

"Even turmoil eventually
settles into relatively
fixed patterns. A vague whiteness
looming."

From Asylum by Amy Gerstler

literacki

"When I talked to people I always made sure there was one near by in which I could see myself. I watched myself talking. And somehow it kept me alert, seeing myself as the others saw me. But everything that goes on in one’s head is so vague, isn’t it? It makes one want to sleep."

Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit

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"Then one day, suddenly, it ends, it changes, I don’t understand, it dies, or it’s me, I don’t understand that either. I ask the words that remain— sleeping, waking, morning, evening. They have nothing to say."

 Samuel Beckett, Endgame