Friday Quotations: Song and Dance

"But back the wedding the band had struck up now, and what a grand noise, for the legendary red-faced fiddler who played all the best weddings had come, and had had a drink, and had got out his fiddle, he was the man to turn curved wood and horsehair, cat-gut and resin into a single blackbird then into a flight of blackbirds signing all the evenings at once, then into a spawn of happy salmon, into the return of the longed-for boat to a port, into the longing that waits in a lucky place for two people who don't yet know each other, the borders cross themselves." --Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy.

Friday Quotations: Honestly, If It Wasn't For Those Pesky Copyright Laws, I'd Just Post Passages from Invisible Cities Every Week

"After a seven days' march through woodland, the traveler directed towards Baucis cannot see the city and yet he has arrived. The slender stilts that rise from the ground at a great distance from one another and are lost above the clouds support the city. You climb them with ladders. On the ground the inhabitants rarely show themselves: having already everything they need up there, they prefer not to come down. Nothing of the city touches the earth except those long flamingo legs on which it rests and, when the days are sunny, a pierced, angular shadow that falls on the foliage.

"There are three hypotheses about the inhabitants of Baucis: that they hate the earth; that they respect it so much that they avoid all contact; that they love it as it was before they existed and with spyglasses and telescopes aimed downward they never tire of examining it, leaf by leaf, stone by stone, ant by ant, contemplating with fascination their own absence."
--Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

"contemplating with fascination their own absence." I love that.

Later Days.

Friday Quotations: And If You're a Cockroach, You Can Use Your Other Arms to Play Cat's Cradle

Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate... but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins.
--Franz Kafka


Later Days.

Friday Quotations: He's Pretty Much the German Equivalent of Shakespeare

"Big books! Lots of knowledge!
Oh, what I will have to learn!
If it doesn't find its way into my head
Let it be in the book instead!"

--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, written in the copy of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary that he (Goethe) gave to his daughter-in-law.

Later Days.

Friday Quotations: Stein Time

"It is very easy to love alone." --Gertrude Stein

Later Days.

Friday Quotations: Loudmouths

"If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence."
— George Eliot