Edwin Arlington Robinson, "Isaac and Archibald" (courtesy of Patrick Kurp)
“That’s it.That's it...7/7 1984 and 1Q84 are fundamentally the same in terms of how they work. If you don’t believe in the world, and if there is no love in it, then everything is phony. No matter which world we are talking about, no matter what kind of world we are talking about, the line separating fact from hypothesis is practically invisible to the eye. It can only be seen with the inner eye, the eye of the mind.”
“Jozef Imrich has written the War and Peace of escapes. Havel tackled free will, Tolstoy the meaning of life, Imrich practiced what they preached... " “When I was growing up, Czechoslovakia was still a country where people darned their socks.” Memories of the Iron Curtain: Who is more of an outlaw than a saint?
"Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore." A sole survivor's life can be a fate worse than death: The names of some writers float through the air like those anonymous insects – midges? gnats? flies? – that swarm in the summer. We ignore them until accidentally ingesting one. Such was my understanding of Robert Fulford. I knew he was a journalist and vaguely associated him with Toronto. In preparation for our visit to that city I read his Accidental City: The Transformation of Toronto (1995) and a very different sort of book – The Triumph of Narrative: Storytelling in the Age of Mass Culture, which he published in 2000 An Almost Physical Need to Tell It
Casanova opens his memoirs with: "I begin by declaring to my reader that in all that I have done throughout my life, good or bad, I am sure that I have earned merit or blame, and as a consequence I believe myself free.
“Pitiful is the person who is afraid of taking risks. Perhaps this person will never be disappointed or disillusioned; perhaps she won't suffer the way people do when they have a dream to follow. But when the person looks back-she will hear her heart”
~ Paulo Coelho quotes (Mystical author, one of Brazil's most successful novelist)
You couldn’t invent a character like Alfred Jarry, the absinthe-drinking, excrement-smearing playwright and star of Parisian literary life...Merrrrdrrrre