Category: Quotes

The essential is the extreme limit of the 'possible', where God himself no longer knows, despairs and kills.

The imitation of Jesus: according to Saint John of the Cross, we must imitate in God (Jesus) the fall from grace, the agony, the moment of 'non-knowledge' of the 'lamma sabachtani'; drunk to the lees, Christianity is the absence of salvation, the despair of God.

… that 'God should be dead', victim of a sacrifice, only has meaning if profound, and differs as much from the evasion of a God in the notion of a clear and servile world as does a human sacrifice, sanctifying the victim, from the slavery which makes of it an instrument of work.

From Bataille, Inner Experience

Would God be a man for whom death, or rather reflection on death, would be a prodigious amusement?

Is God not the major presupposition of thought?

Bataille, notes to Guilty

God is not the limit of man, but the limit of man is divine. Put differently, man is divine in the experience of limits.

The idea of God, the affections, the sweetness, associated with God are preludes to the absence of God. In the night of this absence, the insipidities and affectations have disappeared, reduced to the inconsistency of a childhood memory. The horrible grandeur of God heralds the absence in which man is stripped bare.

God is dead. He is so dead that I could make his death understandable only by killing myself.

Bataille, Guilty (new translation)

Wittgenstein said to me on more than one occasion: 'The trouble with you and me, old man, is that we have no religion!'

Suddenly, during one of our conversations early in 1938, Wittgenstein asked me whether I had ever had any tragedies in my life. Again, true to form, I asked him what he meant by 'tragedy'. 'Well', he replied, 'I don't mean the death of your old grandmother at the age of 85. I mean suicides, madness or quarrels'. I said that I had been fortunate not to have experienced of any of those terrible things.

from Theodore Redpath's, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Student's Memoir

According to Patrick Waldberg, Bataille asked the remaining members of Acephale to kill him at their last meeting on or around 20 October 1939. They refused to do so, and he dissolved the group immediately thereafter. He intended to offer himself as a sacrifice to found the myth of the group and thereby ensure the survival of the community. When they refused to do so, he accused them of having 'abandoned' him.

Stuart Kendall, in his new edition of Bataille's Guilty

Can satire still be written in the age of multi-culturalism, political correctness, and respect for women and minorities?

If a writer worries about political correctness, it's probable that he won't be able to write satire, since satire, by its very nature, offends somebody or something. In our time, satire, in all media, tends to be very tame. The targets are almost always predictable–idiots of the right or left–or stars and celebrities.

We are given satirical treatments of people like Madonna or Prince Charles or Teddy Kennedy or Clarence Thomas! You see the sickening spectacle of the victims of the satire laughing it up with those who satirize them–this is surely a dead giveaway that the satire has no teeth.

Satire should wound, draw blood, even destroy. Some guy on Saturday Night Live, I understand, used to "satirize" George Bush, and Bush invited him to the White House! Sure, satire can indeed be written now, but the satirist must be willing to be despised and assaulted.

Satire is heartless and anarchic. If it's not it's just another mode of entertainment in the great world of entertainment that the United States has become. This kind of juvenile "fun-poking" used to be the province of Mad magazine–fun for the kiddies. Now we have David Letterman "satirizing" his "guests" before they all run down to the bank en masse. On the other hand, maybe we're too far gone for satire, too corrupt, too Goddamned dumb.

Sorrentino, interviewed

Poetry is the plough that turns up time in such a way that the abyssal strata of time, its black earth, appear on the surface. There are epochs, however, when mankind, not satisfied with the present, yearning like the ploughman for the abyssal strata of time, thirsts for the virgin soil of time. Revolution in art inevitably leads to Classicism, not because David reaped the harvest of Robespierre, but because that is what the earth desires.

from Mandelstam's 'Word and Culture'

The October Revolution could not but influence my work since it took away my 'biography', my sense of individual significance. I am grateful to it, however, for once and for all putting an end to my spiritual security and to a cultural life supported by unearned cultural income…. I feel indebted to the Revolution, but I offer it gifts for which it still has no need.

The question about what a writer should be is completely incomprehensible to me: to answer it would be tantamount to inventing a writer, that is, to writing his works for him.

What is more, I am deeply convinced that, in spite of all the limitations and dependence of the writer on social forces, modern science does not possess any means of causing this or that desirable writer to come into existence. Rudimentary eugenics alerts us to the fact that any kind of cultural interbreedin or grafting may produce the most unexpected results. The State procurement of readers is a more likely possibility: for this there exists a direct means: school.

Osip Mandelstam, responding to the questionnaire: 'The Soviet Writer and October'

'The Prince is shouting […] He says, he is always free in himself. his position is between things. And in between things he sees that he is himself the sum of things. And what things add up to is ruin, nothing but ruin. To his followers he is "The Prince" but in his own view, he is the prince of princes. Only he can see the whole, he says, because he can see there is no whole. And for The Prince this is how things must be … as they must always be … he must see with his own eyes. His followers will wreak havoc because they understand his vision perfectly. His followers understand that all thiongs are false pride, but don't know why. The Prince knows: it is because the whole does not exist'.

from Krasznahorkai's, The Melancholy of Resistance

… 'the enormous Strindberg', whom Kafka read 'not to read him but rather to lie upon his breast' …

Robert Calasso, K.

Many are the glosses are commentaries on [Before the Law], which the priest tells Josef K. in the dark cathedral, about the doorkeeper of the Law. The longest, most persuasive gloss is by Kafka himself – it's The Castle. To understand it, one must read all of The Castle, after having replaced each occurrence of the word Castle with the word Law.

from Calasso's K.

He replied to Brod with a closely argued letter in which he explained that the only sensible conclusion he had ever reached in his life was 'not suicide, but the thought of suicide'. If he didn't go beyond the thought, it was due to a further reflection: 'You who can't manage to do anything, you want to do this?'

From Calasso's K.

Nearly everything is totally indifferent to me. Time is passing, boredom is everlasting.

You know, I find myself in this town by pure chance, it has never meant anything to me. It's also by pure chance that I'm the treasurer here. But if I hadn't been here, I would've been somewhere else and have led the same kind of life. However, I cannot reconcile myself to that. I get really upset when I think about it.

Existence has never answered my questions. Just imagine, to live an entire life, my own life at that, without having found the path to where my deepest needs can be seen and heard! I'll die in silence, which frightens me, without a word on my lips, because there's nothing to say.

Bjoern Hansen, in Dag Solstad's Novel 11, Book 18

Our cosmic terror springs from the memory of the endless night against which God fought his first battle. He partly won, for he made night and day alternate. Man tried to establish the reign of day by conquering the night altogether; he was successful only in his imagination. We sleep not to rest but to forget the night we should have defeated.

E.M. Cioran, Tears and Saints

We watch things pass by in order to forget that they are watching us die.

Joe Bousquet.

I've always been writing, even before I ever tried to write anything. The career of a writer doesn't begin at the moment he begins to write. The career and the writing may coincide earlier or later.

Genet, quoted.

There is no eternal return, time does not enable nonchalance; rather, it is distress.

Jacob Taubes (cited)

You are able to destroy everything but if you meet up with someone who is already destroyed, who is definitely on the edge between the life and the death, then these people have to stop. And everyone who has human being, who has humanity, has to stop.

This is my illusion – I believe still in humanity, and I believe still everybody has this humanity because it's in the blood. I know this is a delusion, but I want to believe.

Bela Tarr, interviewed

If you believe in God, you are mad without having gone mad. It is similar to being sick without suffering from any specific illness.

'One thought of God is worth more than the entire world' (Catherine Emmerich). Poor saint, she was so terribly right!

The restlessness of sleepless nights digs trenches where the corpses of memory are rotting.

As a function of despair, God should continue to exist even in the face of irrefutable proof that he does not exist. Truly, every can be used as argument for or against him, because everything in the world both confirms and denies his divinity. Blasphemy and prayer are equally justified. When uttered in the same breath, one comes very close to the Supreme Equivocator.

From the cradle to the grace, each individual pays for the sin of not being God. That's why life is an uninterrupted religious crisis, superficial for believers, shattering for doubters.

E.M. Cioran, Tears and Saints

The globally positioned consumer-citizen is promised freedom and mobility through the wonders of the Internet, but this constant connectivity is in reality just another pressure. Digital consumption becomes an obligation, almost a form of self-care. Like unpaid technicians, we all obediently maintain our own media networks, and we are constantly contactable (especially by employers) through the miracle of the mobile phone, its de-yuppification another example of remote control disguised as liberation.

from Ivor Southwood's Non Stop Inertia

I often think of the hermits of ancient Egypt who dug their own graves and wept in them day and night. When asked why they cried they replied that they wept for their soul.

In the infinity of the desert, a grave is an oasis, a place for comfort. To have a fixed place in space, one digs a hole in the desert. And one dies so that won't get lost.

E.M. Cioran, Tears and Saints

The painter talks, and I listen. I understand little of what he says, often he speaks too softly, as if talking to himself, or else I don't undersand it because it doesn't seem cohenrent, or else because I'm too stupid.

[…] I have observed the painter Strauch, I have lain in wait for him, I have lied to him, because that is what my assignment has called upon me to do, I have driven him crazy with my questions, much crazier than he was before, and I struck him on the head with my silences, on his head that he fears so much. I bothered him with my youth. With my plans. With my fears. With my incapacity. With my moodiness. I talk about death without knowong what death, what life is, what any of it is …

Thomas Bernhard, Frost

One starts off writing with a certain zest, but a time comes when the pen merely grates the dusty ink, and not a drop of life flows, and life is all outside, outside the window, outside oneself, and it seems that never more can one escape into a page one is writing, open out into another world, leap the gap.

[…] A page is good only when we turn it and find life urging along …

Sister Theodora, in Calvino's Our Ancestors

Prefix: What did you think when I told you I loved the record?

 Josh T Pearson: I’m kind of saddened of by it. That sounds stupid, but if you really love it, obviously some bad things have happened to you. If they hadn’t, you could be dismissive and wouldn’t need to spend any time with my album. People gravitate towards light if they’re healthy. It’s not natural to go with the darkness. I’d probably tip my hat and pat you on the back if I saw you, and say “I’m sorry brother. We’ll get through this hopefully.” I’m sorry that you like it.

Interview

… there is not going to be a next serious thing in the novel. Our lovely vulgar and most human art is at an end, if not the end. Yet that is no reason not to want to practice it, or even to read it. In any case, rather like priests who have forgotten the meaning of the prayers they chant, we shall go on for quite a long time talking of books and writing books, pretending all the while not to notice that the church is empty and the parishoners have gone elsewhere to attend other gods, perhaps in silence or with new words. 

Gore Vidal, 'French Letters'

I don't believe in materialism, this consumer society, this capitalism, this monstrosity that goes on here…. I really do believe in something, and I call it 'a day will come'. And one day it will come. Well, it probably won't come, because they've already destroyed it for us, for so many thousands of years they've always destroyed it. It won't come and yet I believe in it. For if I can't believe in it, then I can't go on writing either.

Ingeborg Bachmann, interviewed (cited)

However much we want the dramaturgy to stay out of it, it’s always there. And it’s some kind of game that little Lars has staged in some primary school, and it’ll never have any reality because in a basic basic basic sense deep deep deep down you’re onehundredandninetythousand percent lonely in your own tiny tiny little stupid, ridiculous, humiliating world.

Lars Von Trier, via Notes For Nothing.

[Bloch's] style was that of a prose poet. It modulates brilliantly between the apocalyptic and the everyday, the lyric and the polemic. It sings and stabs. It can be utterly luminious (the early morning was Bloch's hour as it had been Nietzsche's) but it can also be portentously opaque. But above all, it comprises and enacts a range of experience immensely beyond that of customary philosophic and political debate.

from George Steiner's obituary of Ernst Bloch