It was a prophetic corner. For just as there are plants that are said to confer the power to see into the future, so there are place that possess such a virtue. For the most part, they aredeserted places - treetops leaning against walls, blind alleys or front gardens where no one ever stops. In such places, it seems as if all that lies in store for us has become the past.
Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.
Not to find one's way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one's way in a city, as one loses one's way in a forest, requires some schooling. Street names must speak to the urban wanderer like the snapping of dry twigs, and little streets in the heart of the city must reflect the times of day, for him, as clearly as a mountain valley. This art I acquired rather late in life; it fulfilled a dream, of which the first traces were labyrinths on the blotting papers in my school notebooks.
The empty grave and the heart weighed in the balance - two enigmas to which life still owes me the solution.
The dull, mechanical sound of the engine had now been replaced by athe irregular, echoing roar - to me a delicious sound - of waves piled upon each other and breaking in disorder.
An uncertain evil causes anxiety because, at the bottom of one's heart, one goes on hoping till the last moment that it may not be true; a certain evil, on the other hand, instills, for a time, a kind of dreary tranquility.
Because the world to-day is so constructed that no one can do what he would like to do, and he is forced, instead, to do what others wish him to do. Because the question of money always intrudes—into what we do, into what we are, into what we wish to become, into our work, into our highest aspirations, even into our relations with the people we love!
Where and how Dada began is almost as difficult to determine as Homer’s birthplace.
Dada marches on, destroying more and more, not in extension but in itself.
Dada applies itself to everything, and yet it is nothing; it is the point at which Yes and No, and all opposites, meet; not solemnly, in the palaces of human philosophy, but quite simply, at streetcorners, like dogs and grasshoppers.
Dada is useless, like everything else in life.
On the butt-end of a bulging bus which was transbustling an abundance of incubuses and Buchmanites from bumbledom towards their bungalows, a bumptious buckeen whose buttocks were remote from his bust and who was buttired in a boody ridiculous busby, buddenly had a bust-up with a robust buckra who was bumping into him: "Buccaneer, buzz off, you're butting my bunions!"
"History is the science of human unhappiness."
- Raymond Queneau
It is possible to bathe in nonsense ... to be refreshed by it.
Ede says we should post some demotivational phrases on our Facebook pages. I can’t therefore I am. To be is to be condemned. The universe is a mistake. Hope is a kind of delirium. We don’t live even once. Dead days outnumber live ones. The use of philosophy is to sadden. Existence has never answered our questions. Death is the least of our problems.
Benwell’s too late for politics, and we are too late for politics, Ede says. Too late for the Occupation. Too late to march on the streets …
Only the tourists really understand Cambridge, Wittgenstein says. Cambridge is only there to be photographed: that’s what they grasp. Cambridge is a collective fantasy …
There’s a fire backstage, he says. The clown comes out to warn the audience. Laughter and applause. They think it’s a joke! The clown repeats his warning. The fire grows hotter; the applause grows louder. That’s how the world will end, Wittgenstein says: to general applause, from halfwits who think it’s a joke.
The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.
You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?
I know of a wild region whose librarians repudiate the vain superstitious custom of seeking any sense in books and compare it to looking for meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one's hands . . . They admit that the inventors of writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but they maintain that this application is accidental and that books in themselves mean nothing. This opinion - we shall see - is not altogether false.
The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms. I know of districts in which the young men prostrate themselves before books and kiss their pages in a barbarous manner, but they do not know how to decipher a single letter. Epidemics, heretical conflicts, peregrinations which inevitably degenerate into banditry, have decimated the population. I believe I have mentioned suicides, more and more frequent with the years. Perhaps my old age and fearfulness deceive me, but I suspect that the human species -- the unique species -- is about to be extinguished, but the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, infinite, perfectly motionless, equipped with precious volumes, useless, incorruptible, secret.
The Library is a sphere whose exact centre is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible.
Let heaven exist, though my own place be in hell. Let me be tortured and battered and annihilated, but let there be one instant, one creature, wherein thy enormous Library may find its justification.
The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and our future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.
Naturally, the four mathematical operations - adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing - were impossible. The stones resisted arithmetic as they did the calculation of probability. Forty discs, divided, might become nine; those nine in turn divided might yield 300.
If someone were to tell me that there are unicorns on the moon, I could accept or reject the report, or suspend judgement, but it is something I could imagine. If, on the other hand, I were told that six or seven unicorns on the moon could be three, I would declare a priori that such a thing was impossible. The man who has learnt that three plus one are four doesn't have to go through a proof of that assertion with coins, or dice, or chess pieces, or pencils. He knows it, and that's that. He cannot conceive a different sum. There are mathematicians who say that three plus one is a tautology for four, a different way of saying "four" ... But I, Alexander Craigie, of all men on earth, was fated to discover the only objects that contradict that essential law of the human mind. At first I was in a sort of agony, fearing that I'd gone mad; since then, I have come to believe that it would have been better had I been merely insane, for my personal hallucinations would be less disturbing than the discovery that the universe can tolerate disorder. If three plus one can be two, or 14, then reason is madness.
"I will not pretend that, if I had to choose between communism and nazism, I would choose communism."
Speaking in the House of Commons, autumn 1937
"I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisonous gas against uncivilised tribes."
Writing as president of the Air Council, 1919
"It is alarming and nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the east, striding half naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organising and conducting a campaign of civil disobedience, to parlay on equal terms with the representative of the Emperor-King."
Commenting on Gandhi's meeting with the Viceroy of India, 1931
"(India is) a godless land of snobs and bores."
In a letter to his mother, 1896
"I do not admit... that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia... by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race... has come in and taken its place."
Churchill to Palestine Royal Commission, 1937
"The choice was clearly open: crush them with vain and unstinted force, or try to give them what they want. These were the only alternatives and most people were unprepared for either. Here indeed was the Irish spectre - horrid and inexorcisable."
Writing in The World Crisis and the Aftermath, 1923-31
"The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded and insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate... I feel that the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed up before another year has passed."
Churchill to Asquith, 1910
"One may dislike Hitler's system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as admirable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations."
From his Great Contemporaries, 1937
"You are callous people who want to wreck Europe - you do not care about the future of Europe, you have only your own miserable interests in mind."
Addressing the London Polish government at a British Embassy meeting, October 1944
"So far as Britain and Russia were concerned, how would it do for you to have 90% of Romania, for us to have 90% of the say in Greece, and go 50/50 about Yugoslavia?"
Addressing Stalin in Moscow, October 1944
"This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States)... this worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the 19th century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire."
Writing on 'Zionism versus Bolshevism' in the Illustrated Sunday Herald, February 1920
