There are no old secrets. Secrecy is by its nature youthful, a process rather than collections of facts that no one knows. A secret is something that someone in particular doesn’t know. How they are prevented from knowing what by whom and for how long are what matter most.
—Marius Kociejowski, A Factotum in the Book Trade
Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit — all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.
—Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices
[F]emale emancipation, like education, socialism, and Christianity, strikes me as one of those interesting ideas that have never actually been tried out.
—Kingsley Amis, New Maps of Hell
[I]l y a eu un temps où tu n’as pas été esclave, souviens-toi. […] Tu dis qu’il n’y a pas de mots pour décrire ce temps, tu dis qu’il n’existe pas. Mais souviens-toi. Fais un effort pour te souvenir. Ou, à défaut, invente.
—Monique Wittig, Les guérillères
[T]he Great Pyramid of Cheops […] cannot fall down, because a pyramid exists in the shape of a building which has already fallen down.
—Rhys Hughes, A New Universal History of Infamy
Perfect things in poetry do not seem strange, they seem inevitable.
—Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Riddle of Poetry’
‘One thing I did not understand, sir: and that was when you spoke just now of the War Roof.’
‘It is a stone roof, made of the two tablets handed down at Sinai, which God fits over Earth whenever men go to war. For He is merciful: and many of us here remember that once upon a time we were men and women. So when men go to war, God screens the sight of what they do, because He wishes to be merciful to us.’
‘That must prevent, however, the ascent of all prayers that are made in war-time.’
‘Why, but, of course, that is the roof’s secondary purpose,’ replied St. Peter. ‘What else would you expect when the Master’s teachings are being flouted? Rumors get through, though, somehow, and horribly preposterous rumors. For instance, I have actually heard that in war-time, prayers are put up to the Lord God to back His favorites and take part in the murdering. Not,’ said the good Saint, in haste, ’that I would believe even a Christian bishop to be capable of such blasphemy: I merely want to show you, Jurgen, what wild stories get about.’
—James Branch Cabell, Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice
I realized that what aroused the greatest apprehension and disquiet was not the fossilized existence of signs without meaning, but rather the astonishing experience that nothing can be entirely divested of the emanation of meaning […]
—Michal Ajvaz, The Other City (trans. Gerald Turner)
I shall never be ashamed to go to a bad author for a good quotation.
—Seneca, ‘On Tranquillity of Mind’ (trans. C. D. N. Costa)
He who fears death will never do anything worthy of a living man.
—Seneca, ‘On Tranquillity of Mind’ (trans. C. D. N. Costa)