Ben Marcus: Leaving the Sea Stories

Perhaps they didn't know they were at sea. Was there a certain percentage of people at sea who lacked the knowledge that they were at sea?

Zoe Pilger: Eat My Heart Out

"In this late industrial capitalist inferno, honesty is a rare quality," said the professor. "It entails a kind of brutality. I've been saying that since the 1950s when the mixed economy and the welfare state were not a phantasm."

Mckenzie Wark: The Beach Beneath the Street

A giant inflatable dog turd broke loose from its moorings outside the Paul Klee Center in Switzerland and brought down power lines before coming to a halt in the grounds of a children’s home. The PaulMcCarthy sculpture, the size of a house, reached a maximum altitudeof 200 meters. Other civilizations had their chosen forms: from theObelisk of Luxor to Michelangelo’s David. The futurist poet Marinettifound his crashed motor car more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace, but he might have balked at flying dog shit. In the twenty-first century, the insomnia of reason does not breed monsters, but pets.No wonder there are no longer any gods, when what is expected of them is that they descend from Mount Olympus with plastic baggiesand clean up.

Andre Breton: Nadja

Perhaps my life is nothing but an image of this kind; perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I simply should recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten.

There is no use being alive if one must work. The event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his own life’s meaning - that event which I may not yet have found, but on whose path I seek myself - is not earned by work.

"I am the soul in limbo.”

Paul Verhaeghen: Omega Minor

Omega is a parameter that is very much needed to describe the universe, and Omega is the biggest riddle of them all. Omega is the parameter that tells us what will happen to the universe, what will happen to us, and there is something seriously wrong with the value of that parameter.

He fumes in silence. Then he explodes. "It is not my obligation, dear sir, to testify. My obligation is to forget. It is a misunderstanding that only living mouths can tell stories and that, just because I am one of the last survivors, it is my duty to get up on stage and speak. That is too much responsibility. That is too much to ask. Besides," says De Heer, "what do I have to say ? I do not believe the myth that society has made out of history. I cannot live up to the sainthood requirement. I hardly feel like any of this was real."