"It’s not a good cast of human being here,” he said. “The people are relatively short. The infants are given ‘brandy rags’ to suck, to keep them from screaming… Alcohol has displaced milk. They all have high squeaky voices. Most of them are crippled in one form or another. All of them are conceived in drunkenness. For the most part criminal characters… Child abuse, killings, are Sunday afternoon stuff… The animals are better off: after all, what people would really like is a pig, not a kid"
"One man thinks pretty much what the man next to him thinks: the human porridge of the traffic accident, weeks ago, or years..."
... A year ago, he took over from a man who died of septicemia. “He scratched himself with a fawn’s bone."
"My notion of infinity is the same as the one I had when I was three years old. Less than that. It begins where your eyes end. Where everything ends. And it never begins."
"The world isn't the world, it's a zero."
"You know," the painter said, "that art froth, that artist fornication, that general art-and-artist loathsomeness, I always found that repelling; those cloud formations of basest self-preservation topped with envy... Envy is what holds artists together, envy, pure envy, everyone envies everyone else for everything... I talked about it once before, I want to say: artists are sons and daughters of loathsomeness, of paradisiac shamelessness, the original sons and daughters of lewdness; artists, painters, writers, and musicians are the compulsive masturbators on the planet, its disgusting cramps, its peripheral puffings and swellings, its pustular secretions... I want to say: artists are the great emetic agents of the time, they were always the great, the very great, the very greatest emetics... Artists, are they not a devastating army of absurdity, of scum?"
"What goes on in a brain that conceives itself to be the centre of the world. Millions of lights going on and off in millions of centres! That's the world. That's all it is."
"You are molested wherever you go”, said the painter. “It’s as if everyone had conspired to bother you. An instinct that rages through them all like wildfire. Against you. You wake up, and you feel molested. In fact: the hideous thing. You open your chest of drawers: a further molestation. Washing and dressing are molestations. Having to get dressed! Having to eat breakfast!"
"Worth is worthlessness, the calamity of worthlessness is the worthlessness of one’s own world and of the world unconnected to one’s own."
As he drove away, I began to think that what kept us together was perhaps not even our romance with an imaginary France. That was just a veneer, an illusion. Rather, it was our desperate inability to lead ordinary lives with ordinary people anywhere--ordinary loves, ordinary homes, ordinary careers, watching ordinary television, eating ordinary meals, with ordinary friends--even ordinary friends we didn't have, or couldn't keep.
... No one starts as a self-hater. But rack up all of your mistakes and take a large enough number of wrong turns in life and soon you stop trying to forgive yourself. Everywhere you look you find shame or failure staring back.
...in my world, a man who darns his own socks is not a man.
... I liked forgetting my cares. Thanks to wine, you didn't forget them, they just stopped scaring you for a while.
For some time now Wandernburg had been visible in the distance, to the south. And yet, thought Hans, as often happens at the end of an exhausting day, the small city seemed to be moving in step with them,and getting no nearer.
... Love and translation look alike in their grammar. To love someone implies transforming their words into ours. Making an effort to understand the other person and, inevitably, to misinterpret them. To construct a precarious language together.
... Packing a bag doesn't make you aware of changes, rather it compels you to postpone the past, and the present is taken up with concerns about the immediate. Time slides over the travelers' skin.
