Bradley L. Garrett: Explore Everything: Place Hacking the City

Urban exploration can be read as a reactionary practice working to take place back from exclusionary private and government forces, to redemocratise spaces urban inhabitants have lost control over.

Tao Lin: Taipei

Gradually, after being the target a few times of a similar capriciousness, which he discerned as default behavior for most people, and not liking it, Paul learned to not be more generous or enthusiastic or attentive that he could sustain regardless of his mood and to not talk to people if his only reason to was because he felt lonely or bored.

It would take her thousands of steps to get anywhere, but she would get there easily, and when she arrived, in the present, it would seem like it had been a single movement that brought her there. Did existence ever seem worked for? One seemed simply to be here, less an accumulation of moments than a single arrangement continuously gifted from some inaccessible future.

After untangling a cord, then moving the MacBook to the floor, Paul lay beside Erin and meekly pawed her forearm three times, then briefly held some of her fingers, which were surprisingly warm. He lay stomach-down with his arm on her arm, thinking that if she woke, while he was asleep, this contact could be viewed as accidental. Maybe she would roll toward him, resting her arm across his back—they'd both be stomach-down, as if skydiving—in an unconscious or dream-integrated manner she wouldn't remember, in the morning, when they'd wake in a kind of embrace and begin kissing, neither knowing who initiated, therefore brought together naturally, like plants that join at their roots.

On average, since the urge to kill myself isn't so strong that I actually kill myself, the world is worth living in.

Junichiro Tanizaki: Diary of a Mad Old Man

When she treads on my grave and feels as if she’s trampling on that doting old man’s bones, my spirit will still be alive, feeling the whole weight of her body, feeling pain, feeling the fine-grained velvety smoothness of the soles of her feet. Even after I’m dead I’ll be aware of that. I can’t believe I won’t. In the same way, Satsuko will be aware of the presence of my spirit, joyfully enduring her weight. Perhaps she may even hear my charred bones rattling together, chuckling, moaning, creaking. And that would by no means occur only when she was actually stepping on my grave. At the very thought of those Buddha’s Footprints modeled after her own feet she would hear my bones wailing under the stone. Between sobs I would scream: “It hurts! It hurts! … Even though it hurts, I’m happy—I’ve never been more happy, I’m much, much happier than when I was alive! … Trample harder! Harder!

It’s odd, but even when I am in pain I have a sexual urge. Perhaps especially when I am in pain I have a sexual urge. Or should I say that I am more attracted, more fascinated by women who cause me pain?

After looking at myself in the mirror, I looked at Satsuko. I could not believe that we were creatures of the same species. The uglier the face in the mirror, the more extraordinarily beautiful Satsuko seemed. If that ugly face were only uglier, I thought regretfully, Satsuko would look even more beautiful.

Karl Ove Knausgård: My Struggle Book 1

When I look at a beautiful painting I have tears in my eyes, but not when I look at my children. That does not mean I do not love them, because I do, with all my heart, it simply means that the meaning they produce is not sufficient to fulfill a whole life. Not mine, at any rate.

“Was it Jesus you saw a picture of?” he says and looks up at me. If it had not been for the friendly voice and the long pause before the question, I would have thought he was making fun of me. He finds it a little embarrassing that I am a Christian; all he wants is for me not to be different from the other kids, and of all the kids in the neighbourhood, his youngest son is the only one to call himself a Christian.
But he is really wondering about this.
I feel a flutter of joy because he actually cares, and at the same time I become a bit offended that he underestimates me like that.
I shake my head.
“It wasn’t Jesus,” I say.”

Now I saw his lifeless state. And that there was no longer any difference between what once had been my father and the table he was lying on, or the floor on which the table stood, or the wall socket beneath the window, or the cable running to the lamp beside him. For humans are merely one form among many, which the world produces over and over again, not only in everything that lives but also in everything that does not live, drawn in sand, stone, and water. And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor.

For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops.

The only thing I have learned from life is to endure it, never to question it, and to burn up the longing generated by this in writing. Where this ideal has come from I have no idea, and as I now see it before me, in black and white, it almost seems perverse.

For, while previously I saw time as a stretch of terrain that had to be covered, with the future as a distant prospect, hopefully a bright one, and never boring at any rate, now it is interwoven with our life here and in a totally different way. Were I to portray this with a visual image it would have to be that of a boat in a lock: life is slowly and ineluctably raised by time seeping in from all sides. Apart from the details, everything is always the same. And with every passing day the desire grows for the moment when life will reach the top, for the moment when the sluice gates open and life finally moves on. At the same time I see that precisely this repetitiveness, this enclosedness, this unchangingness is necessary, it protects me. On the few occasions I have left it, all the old ills return.

Michel Houellebecq: The Map and the Territory

They really don't amount to much, anyway, human relationships.

Flowers are only sexual organs, brightly coloured vaginas decorating the surface of the world, open to the lubricity of insects.

What can you reply, in general, to human questions?

It was conceivably true, he thought, that France was a marvelous country - at least from the tourist's point if view.

It doesn't amount to much, generally speaking, a human life.

Sexuality is a fragile thing: it is difficult to enter, and easy to leave.

Joseph Roth: The Radetzky March

That was how things were back then. Anything that grew took its time growing, and anything that perished took a long time to be forgotten. But everything that had once existed left its traces, and people lived on memories just as they now live on the ability to forget quickly and emphatically.

"Anyway, I am unfitted to hold down a job anywhere unless they were to pay me for getting angry at the world."

A lot of truths about the living world are recorded in bad books; they are just badly written about.

J. G. Ballard: High Rise

Let the psychotics take over. They alone understood what was happening.

In a sense life in the high-rise had begun to resemble the world outside - there were the same ruthlessness and agression concealed within a set of polite conventions.

Within half an hour almost all the women were drunk, a yardstick Laing had long used to measure the success of a party

"One rule in life", he murmured to himself. "If you can smell garlic, everything is all right".

H. P. Lovecraft: The Call of Cthulhu & Other Weird Stories

We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.

Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species - if separate species we be - for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world.