Quotes of the Month

Decidedly it will never have been given to me to finish anything, except perhaps breathing. One must not be greedy.

Say what you will, you can't keep a dead mind down.

"Humanity is a well with two buckets," said Wylie, "one going down to be filled, the other coming up to be emptied."

"Once a certain degree of insight has been reached," said Wylie, "all men talk, when talk they must, the same tripe."

And all these questions I ask myself. It is not in a spirit of curiosity. I cannot be silent. About myself I need know nothing. Here all is clear. No, all is not clear. But the discourse must go on. So one invents obscurities. Rhetoric.

How agreeable it is to be confirmed, after a more or less long period of vacillation, in one's first impressions. Perhaps this is what tempers the pangs of death.

Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept.

That the impossible should be asked of me, good, what else could be asked of me? But the absurd! Of me whom they have reduced to reason.

If I was dead, I wouldn't know I was dead. That's the only thing I have against death. I want to enjoy my death. That's where liberty lies: to see oneself dead.

Is not a uniform suffering preferable to one which, by its ups and downs, is liable at certain moments to encourage the view that perhaps after all it is not eternal?

We are all born mad. Some remain so.

What I liked in anthropology was its inexhaustible faculty of negation, its relentless definition of man, as though he were no better than God, in terms of what he is not.

But I do not think even Sisyphus is required to scratch himself, or to groan, or to rejoice, as the fashion is now, always at the same appointed places. And it may even be they are not too particular about the route he takes provided it gets him to his destination safely and on time. And perhaps he thinks each journey is his first. This would keep hope alive, would it not, hellish hope. Whereas to see yourself doing the same thing endlessly over and over again fills you with satisfaction.

If I have said anything to the contrary I was mistaken. If I say anything to the contrary again I shall be mistaken again. Unless I am mistaken now. Into the dossier with it in any case, in support of whatever thesis you fancy.

But the idea of ageing was not exactly the one that offered itself to me. And what I saw was more like a crumbling, a frenzied collapsing of all that had always protected me from all I was condemned to be. Or it was like a kind of clawing towards a light and countenance I could not name, that I had once known and long denied.

I pause to record that I feel in extraordinary form. Delirium perhaps.

I must be happy, he said, it is less pleasant than I should have thought.

SPECTATOR: Actually, who wrote this rubbish? (checks programme) Beckett (he says Béké), Samuel, Béké, Béké, he must be a cross between a Jew from Greenland and a peasant from the Auvergne.
GLAZIER: Never heard of him. Seems he eats his soup with a fork.
SPECTATOR: Doesn't matter. Remainder him...