Miscellaneous quotation

"We are our memory,
we are this chimerical museum of shifting forms,
this heap of broken mirrors."

--Borges, "Cambridge"

Miscellaneous quotation

“The secret, I should tell you, is not as valuable as the steps that brought me to it. Those steps have to be taken, not told.”

--Borges, "The Anthropologist"

Miscellaneous quotation

In speaking and in writing something mad occurs: the true conversation is a pure play of words. What’s amazing, in fact, is that people should make such a ridiculous mistake as to imagine they are speaking of things. Precisely what is most characteristic of language—that it attends only to itself—everybody ignores. As a result it is a wondrous and fruitful mystery—to the point that, if one speaks purely for the sake of speaking, one expresses the most splendid, the most original truths. But if a person wishes to speak of some particular thing, that capricious creature language has him say the most ridiculous and muddle-headed of stuff. Which explains the hatred some serious people have for language. They see its mischievousness, but they don’t see that contemptible chatter is the infinitely serious side of language. If only one could have people understand that what applies to mathematical formulas applies to language too. They form a world apart, they play with each other, expressing only their own prodigious nature, which is precisely why they are so expressive—precisely why the strange play of relationships between things finds its reflection in them. Only by means of their freedom are they members of nature, and only in their free movements does the spirit of the world manifest itself and make itself the delicate measure and pattern of things. The same is true of language: he who has a subtle sense of its fingering, its timing, its musical spirit, he who intuits the delicate operation of its intimate nature, moving tongue or hand to it as he follows, he will be a prophet; conversely, he who knows this, but does not have the ear or the ability to write truths like these, will be mocked by language itself and derided by men, as was Cassandra by the Trojans. If in saying this I believe I have shown, in the clearest way possible, the essence and say it, so that no poetry has come out of it at all. But what if I felt compelled to speak? what if this linguistic impulse to speak were the hallmark of the inspiration of language, of the operation of language, in me? what if my will wanted only what I am compelled to do? might not this, in the end, without my realizing or imagining it, be poetry and make a mystery of language comprehensible? and would I then be a writer by vocation, since a writer can only be someone who is possessed by language?

--Novalis, "Monologue" qtd. in Calasso's Literature and the Gods, p. 191

Miscellaneous quotation

"a camel is a horse designed by a committee"

Miscellaneous quotation

 "Until you’re about the age of twenty, you read everything, and you like it simply because you are reading it. Then between twenty and thirty you pick what you want, and you read the best, you read all the great works. After that you sit and wait for them to be written. But you know, the least known, the least famous writers, they are the better ones."
--Gabriel Garcia Marquez

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1973/01/the-yellow-trolley-car-in-barcelona-and-other-visions/

Miscellaneous quotation

"Even if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature as a terminology it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent must function also as a deflection of reality."
--Kenneth Burke

Miscellaneous quotation

“Men are disturbed not by events but by their opinion about events.”
--Epictetus

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/wellbeing/10146546/Anxious-Depressed-Try-Greek-philosophy.html

Miscellaneous quotation

“Literature is the right use of language irrespective of the subject or reason of the utterance. A political speech may be, and sometimes is, literature; a sonnet to the moon may be, and often is, trash. Style is what distinguishes literature from trash.”
--Evelyn Waugh

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/is-philosophy-literature/

Miscellaneous quotation

"Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven."
--Walter Benjamin

Miscellaneous quotation

"The cutting edge isn’t the cutting edge without the rest of the blade.”
--Joshua Sosin

http://www.thedurhamnews.com/2013/07/05/216106/brodhead-remind-people-why-humanities.html