booksalves

[booksalves]

Joseph Mallord William Turner (English,1775-1851)

The Scarlet Sunset, c.1830-40

Watercolour and gouache on paper

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"It seems success takes you away from what you know, while failure condemns you to it."

Rachel Cusk, Outline

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"He didn't once glance back at me, for people are at their least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them."

Rachel Cusk, Outline

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"Those thoughts only existed within certain structures, and I had definitively left those structures."

Rachel Cusk, Outline

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You actually mustn’t try too hard with this stuff. The skill of this is to make people believe they’ve made their own minds up…If they ask you a question, that’s their flick switch..

Nigel Farage

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"Now, comrades, what is the nature of this life of ours? Let us face it, our lives are miserable, laborious and short. We are born, we are given just so much food as will keep the breath in our bodies, and those of us who are capable of it are forced to work to the last atom of our strength; and the very instant that our usefulness has come to an end we are slaughtered with hideous cruelty.  No animal in England knows the meaning of happiness or leisure after he is a year old. No animal in England is free. The life of an animal is misery and slavery; that is the plain truth."

George Orwell, Animal Farm

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"the law of averages was not something it paid to base your personal expectations on"

Rachel Cusk, Outline

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"The unexpected sometimes looks like a prompting of fate."

Rachel Cusk, Outline

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"But she knew that if she followed that reasoning the rest of her life would be one long struggle to find a response to the question that constantly threatened to destroy her fragile equilibrium"

Han Kang, Greek Lessons

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"Even the occasional memorable event is soon erased without a trace under time's huge, opaque mass."

Han Kang, Greek Lessons

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You dig a hole and the next thing they say is fill it in; fill it in and they tell you to dig a hole. They’re always screwing with the guy in the field.

Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

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The internet's a great place for finding out about stuff you're kind of interested in, but it can't really help with the things you really want to know. It's even worse for things you don't know anything about.

Emi Yagi, Diary of a Void

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Meaning wasn't in me, meaning wasn't in another, meaning arose in the encounter between us.

Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Morning Star

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People are spurred to act less by eager dreams of a happy future than by anxiety over the danger, remote or otherwise, of remaining stuck in the status quo.

Keiichiro Hirano, At the End of the Matinee

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In exchange for the privilege of life, individuals in the modern world put up with ceaseless clamor. Not only in noises but images, smells, tastes, perhaps even the warmth of others...all of it rushing at them in a mad free-for-all, each bit screaming its presence. And society, still unsatisfied, crammed in yet more, until one's very sense of time was destroyed. It was unbearable, human exhaustion. Surely this was a historic, decisive change, wasn't it? From now on, people would forevermore be creatures of exhaustion, distinguished from other animals by their continual state of fatigue. Caught up in the tempo of machines and computers, their senses buffeted by constant noise, people griped about daily life with piteous intensity before entering the complete silence obtainable only by death.

Keiichiro Hirano, At the End of the Matinee

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Listening to a musical theme develop, you can come to see that it contained a certain potentiality all along. Once you follow it to the end, the theme never sounds the same again. A bud that you look at knowing nothing of the flower to come isn't the same as the bud you look back on in memory with the flower before you. Music doesn't just progress forward in a straight line but works backward into the past as well. Without understanding that, you would never appreciate the fascination of the fugue... People think that only the future can be changed, but in fact, the future is continually changing the past. The past can and does change. It's exquisitely sensitive and delicately balanced.

Keiichiro Hirano, At the End of the Matinee

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We were angry all the time. We were envious all the time. We were relieved that we were being looked at by people who were just as angry, and just as envious, as we were. Some people grew nervous that they would be left behind by the times; these people turned their backs on culture and took pleasure in the days passing the way they always had — with the sun rising in the morning, and going down at night. We were curious about the world to come, but were relieved that its problems would not be our own. Some people experienced a delightful sort of rest in becoming very small, very inferior, and very irrelevant, in the face of such chaos and change. Yet in the midst of all this, one could still see, on one's bookshelf, books that were hundreds — even thousands! — of years old, that were relevant today. Yet none of the books which were twenty years old were the least bit relevant anymore.

Sheila Heti, Pure Colour