September 27, 2023

Clippings

September 2023

All is tradable somewhere because we live in a forgotten way in some corner of the beginning of the end of the beginning. I don’t know who I really mean by ‘we.’ But it does seem this place has been handed some moment in history then grown fearful and impulsive about hanging on to it. A useless lunge. Sinful even. A good scalawag sticks to her diary.

— Lorrie Moore1

He was old enough now to know that these situations, these flowerings, which in youth seem almost incidental to the forward-driving story of life, in fact turn out to be life itself. It was in these moments of hope and expectation and disillusion, of prelude, before the will decides to conscript the self into conformity, that we had really lived.

— Rachel Cusk2

The feeling of having died and yet not really died, of how one had been subtracted from all that makes life a living experience.

— Dambudzo Marechera3

(to say nothing of the fact that it was dark and it had become almost impossible to distinguish the genuine from monsters of the imagination)

— Laszlo Krasznahorkai4

Yet he still wanted to be Number One. That’s the sort of person he was.

— Robert Walser5

Deep in her soul, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a sailor in distress, she would gaze out over the solitude of her life with desperate eyes, seeking some white sail in the mists of the far off horizon.

— Gustave Flaubert6

Don Quixote did not wish to eat breakfast because, as has been stated, he meant to live on sweet memories.

— Miguel de Cervantes7

I have always kept a notebook by my side when I’m working or trying to work, and it becomes the repository for any stray thought or description that occurs to me—I try to catch every one. In those years I wrote a lot in the notebook because of a certain restlessness: if I was having trouble with a piece of writing—and I usually was—I could at least write something in the notebook. I could at least record in the notebook how much trouble I was having with what I was trying to write.

— Lydia Davis8

In their latter stages [the Diaries] are in effect an admission by a great writer in dark times that he has come to a dead end and that he does not have it in him to rescue himself through a heroic new project, yet half hoping, nevertheless, that the record of his travails, in all its integrity and all the evidence it will present of a true and full engagement with the accursed era into which he was born, can be brought to weigh in his favor.

— J. M. Coetzee9