Georges Simenon: The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien

The poor are used to stifling any expression of their despair, because they must get on with life, with work, with the demands made of them day after day, hour after hour.

Georges Simenon: Pietr the Latvian

What he sought, what he waited and watched out for was the crack in the wall. In other words, the instant when the human being comes out from behind the opponent . . . 

"Good Lord! Is this the way you search for someone?" she snapped, turning to Maigret. "I'm told you're from the police. My husband may have been killed.... What are you waiting for?"
The heavy gaze that he turned on her was a hundred percent Maigret. Utterly calm. Utterly indifferent. As though he had just heard a fly buzzing. As though he were looking at some completely commonplace object.

Laszlo Kraznahorkai: The Last Wolf and Herman

The love of animals is the one true love in which one is never disappointed.


... for how could he describe what so weighed him down, how could he explain how long ago he had given up the idea of thought, the point at which he first understood the way things were and knew that any sense we had of existence was merely a reminder of the incomprehensible futility of existence, a futility that would repeat itself ad infinitum, to the end of time and that, no, it wasn't a matter of chance and its extraordinary, inexhaustible, triumphant, unconquerable power working to bring matters to birth or annihilation, but rather the matter of a shadowy demonic purpose, something embedded deep in the heart of things, in the texture of the relationship between things, the stench of whose purpose filled every atom, that it was a curse, a form of damnation, that the world was the product of scorn, and god help the sanity of those who called themselves thinkers.


... and whereas our techniques—having realized in the wake of our sorry experiences that we were not questing heroes but merely dumb victims of the thinking mind—were based on paraphiliac fulfillment, unbridled pursuit of pleasure, the ceaseless apocatastasis of an eden missing from primal imagination, and took refuge in transgression, herman's deliberately paltry means were called into being by hubris, a hubris that believed in the invincibility of weakness.


He couldn't write about anything, for really, what could he possibly do with his hopelessly complex, labyrinthine thoughts and sentences, but never mind.

Cixin Liu: Death's End

“Weakness and ignorance are not barriers to survival, but arrogance is.”


“If we lose our human nature, we lose much, but if we lose our bestial nature, we lose everything.”


“And now we know that this is the journey that must be made by every civilization: awakening inside a cramped cradle, toddling out of it, taking flight, flying faster and farther, and, finally, merging with the fate of the universe as one. The ultimate fate of all intelligent beings has always been to become as grand as their thoughts.”


“Hide yourself well; cleanse well.”


“Because the universe is not a fairy tale.”


On the day of the universe's Last Judgment, two humans and a robot belonging to the Earth and Trisolaran civilizations embraced each other in ecstasy.


“Even Coca-Cola probably tasted medicinal the first time you tried it. Anything addictive is like that.”


“Time is the cruelest force of all.”


“The universe is but a corpse puffing up.”


"Mere existence is already the result of incredible luck. Such was the case on Earth in the past, and such has always been the case in this cruel universe. But at some point, humanity began to develop the illusion that they’re entitled to life, that life can be taken for granted.”


“A bottomless abyss exists in every inch”

Christopher Schaberg and Mark Yakich (Editors): Airplane Reading

I don’t enjoy flying. The wide range of emotions offered whilst taking off and zipping through the air is a volatile mix of fear, anxiety, dread, boredom, disbelief, and suspicion of every operating system the plane uses. A bump of turbulence ignites my survival instinct that instructs me to grab the nearest object or person and cling to it/them for dear life. When the plane begins its descent a wave of euphoria, hardly felt in my day to day life, cleanses me. I’m released from the funk I’ve been locked in for the past few hours and by the time I’m through customs the ordeal is virtually forgotten. I’ll live to fly again. Oddly enough, what I do enjoy about flying is being in an airport. Glass and concrete Mecca’s of continuous human flow; a conduit of a shared experience that so utterly depends on perspective. There are not many places in the world where so many humans of varied backgrounds, ethnicity, religion, or class convene in one place and do it in peaceful and cooperative terms. Their day to day lives hardly ever untwine; but for a few hours they are united in flight and destination. They may even sit side by side whilst flying and connect with one another. Could the Earth’s socio-political issues be dealt with inside a bustling airport?

Rachel Cusk: Outline

What Ryan had learned from this is that your failures keep returning to you, while your successes are something you always have to convince yourself of.


As it happened, I was no longer interested in literature as a form of snobbery or even self-definition. I had no desire to prove that one book was better than another; in fact, if I read something I admired, I found myself increasingly disinclined to mention it at all. What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.


Sometimes it has seemed to me that life is a series of punishments for such moments of unawareness, that one forges one’s own destiny by what one doesn’t notice or feel compassion for; that what you don’t know and don’t make the effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into knowledge of.


People are least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.


I remembered the way, when each of my sons was a baby, they would deliberately drop things from their high chair in order to watch them fall to the floor, an activity as delightful to them as its consequences were appalling. They would stare down at the fallen thing – a half-eaten rusk, or a plastic ball – and become increasingly agitated by its failure to return. Eventually they would begin to cry, and usually found that the fallen object came back to them by that route. It always surprised me that their response to this chain of events was to repeat it: as soon as the object was in their hands they would drop it again, leaning over to watch it fall. Their delight never lessened, and nor did their distress. I always expected that at some point they would realise the distress was unnecessary and would choose to avoid it, but they never did. The memory of suffering had no effect whatever on what they elected to do: on the contrary, it compelled them to repeat it, for the suffering was the magic that caused the object to come back and allowed the delight in dropping it to become possible again. Had I refused to return it the very first time they dropped it, I suppose they would have learned something very different, though what that might have been I wasn’t sure.


What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.

Franco "Bifo" Berardi: Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide

The naked reality of capitalism is today on display. And it's horrible.


The subject of this book is not merely crime and suicide, but more broadly the establishment of a kingdom of nihilism and the suicidal drive that is permeating contemporary culture, together with a phenomenology of panic, aggression and resultant violence.


Financial capitalism is based on a process of unrelenting deterritorialization, and this is causing fear to spread among those who are unable to deal with the precariousness of daily life and the violence of the labour market. This fear in turn provokes a counter-effect of aggressive re-territorialization by those who try to grasp some form of identity, some sense of belonging, because only a feeling of belonging offers the semblance of shelter, a form of protection. But belonging can only be conclusively proved by an act of aggression against the other, the combined effect of deterritorialization in the sphere of financial capitalism and of re-territorialization in the realm of identity is leading to a state of permanent war.


Now, it is finally crystal clear: resistance is over. Capitalist absolutism will not be defeated and democracy will never be reinstated. That game is over.