"They would line up the glasses on the open shelves... they would go for walks on endless summer evenings... they would spend long weekends together... they would light candles... every once in a while, they would buy a toy... they would send an invoice and check Instagram... on Saturday they would sit down at the double desk... they would spend entire meals browsing Netflix recommendations... they would spend their mornings..." etc

There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.��

"If I'd stayed there, would I always have been happy? No, I suppose not. People move away, grow older die, and the bright belief that there will always be another marvellous thing around each corner fades. It is now or never; we must snatch at happiness as it flies."

I have a tendency to be like Charles Bradlaugh, who was a Suffolk man. I am not an atheist but I have strong views about politics and the Church. Bradlaugh wasn't against Church, he was against the set-up. I'm against the set-up. But I think it was an extremely good thing that religion should be accepted as the saviour pf civilisation. So I think it right that it should be carried on, If you forsake religion, it's back to the savages. This is what is happening now.

The village girls like to get married very young but the boys don't. Many of the boys don't want to marry until they are about thirty, although plenty of them have to long before then. I have a friend whose girl made all the running before they were wed, now he has to beg for it.

There was more incest in the past and it was always fathers and daughters, never brothers and sisters. It happened when mother had too many children, or when mother was ill, or when mother was dead. And very often it didn't matter a bit. The daughter usually proved to be very fond of the father and there would be no sign of upset in the family. No, I think it was quite an understood thing that a daughter would take on the father when the mother was ill or dead.

'All I knew, really, was that she had taken away with her when she had gone something which in the past had held me together, some necessary sense of myself, something without which I seemed in danger of collapsing; and whatever it was, an indispensable vanity, an irreplaceable idea of my own invulnerability, it was gone and only she could restore it to me, or so I thought.

If you came here expecting coherent plot or structure, you bought or stole the wrong book.

Outside, the male waters poured out of the skies with a roar and the earth opened its thighs and giggled.

'Then I met Rebecca but we'll get to her. Then my life changed but we'll get to that. Then I took my father's gun but we'll get to that.'

The garden was huge, like a park, shady, mildly fragrant in the warm summer air; pungent smell of pines, their resin dripping from green cones that snap quietly as they grow; firm rosebuds resplendent in red, yellow, white and pink hues; and yes, a single, ruffled, and slightly singed petal that could open no further, now almost ready to fall; and the tall, rearing lilies with their wasp-enticing nectar; violet, maroon, and blue cups of petunias fluttering in the slightest breeze; long-stemmed snapdragons swaying more indolently in the wind; and along the footpaths, great patches of foxgloves luxuriating in the flaming brilliance of their own colours; opalescent shimmer of dewy grass in the morning sun; clusters of....

What colour is the spatial infinity? it is the colour of air.

I want to die with life

I think I'm going to have to ask for permission to die.

Now suddenly at three in the morning I woke and met myself.

Nothing diminishes a man and drags him down so much as the consciousness of not being loved.

Simply, at the age of forty, I have decided to live as I please, not worrying about conventions, or laws, because I have found out, rather late in the day, that nobody observes them and that, until now, I have been duped.

I have spent forty years being bored. For forty years, I looked at life like some street urchin with his nose pressed up against the window of a cake shop, watching other people eating pastries. Now I know that the pastries go to the people who take the trouble to grab them.

Old women like Peta Ponce have the power to fold time over and confuse it, they multiply and divide it, events are refracted in their gnarled hands as in the most brilliant prism, they cut the consecutive happening of things into fragments they arrange in parallel form, they bend those fragments and twist them into shapes that enable them to carry out their designs.

"He had joined a book �� reading club, mostly of women, jolly, middle-aged, who ridiculed his proposals of novels to read, listened in silence to his halting comments on the book-of-the–month and moved promptly on the topics of their own concerns."

"Daddy would say to wish in one hand and shit in the other, see which one fills up first."

"Even in the inmost rooms of the library, on the third storey of the north-east wing, I sometimes heard, across courtyards shaded from the late afternoon sunlight or swept by the flight of bats at dusk, the first, and then, after an interval almost exactly predictable, the second of the immoderate roars that marked the dual climax of some revelation by a client whose final achievement had been to suggest, through the difficult medium of his particular craft, some detail of a plain paradoxically apart from, and yet defining further, the land revealed moments afterwards between the ponderously parting curtains."

"I too have admired the tortuous arguments and detailed elaborations, the pointing-up of tenuous links and faint reverberations, and the final triumphant demonstrations that something of a motif has persisted through an immense body of digressive and even imprecise prose."

"just as a landscape painted against the background of a black room loses its vital iridescence but thereby acquires a mineral stability and seems to filter out things what best translates their dim reverie of inertia, it was as if the sounds here were decanted, filtered through a cloak of snow, whereby they lost their ordinary meaning in order to swell to a deep and indistinct murmur which became the very sound of returning life"

The phone rang. It rang several times before I could struggle out of bed and answer it.
"Mr Chinaski?"
"Yes."
"This is the Times Building."
"Yes?"
"We've reviewed your application and would like to employ you."
"Reporter?"
"No, maintenance man and janitor."

PAGE 29 - "I believed fervently that I needed my sister in order to be able to start my work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. And then, when she was there, I knew that I didn't need her, that I could start work only if she wasn't there. But now she's gone and I'm really unable to start. At first it was because she was there, and now it's because she isn't."

PAGE 50 - "We must commit ourselves one hundred per cent to everything we do, my father always said. He said it to everybody - to my mother, to my sisters, to me. If we don't commit ourselves one hundred per cent we fail even before we've begun. But what is one hundred per cent in this case? Haven't I prepared for this work one hundred per cent?����

PAGE 60 - "How long it is since I last took these cases out of the chest! I said to myself. Far too long. In fact the cases were dusty, even though they had been in the chest ever since my last trip, that is my last trip to Palma."

PAGE 124 "At two o' clock in the afternoon, when the car came to collect me, it was still eleven degrees below zero in Peiskam, but on my arrival in Palma, where I am writing these notes, the thermometer showed eighteen degrees above."

"... 'Judging from Kaput,' answered Pierre Lyautey, 'one would say that Malaparte eats nothing but nightingales' hearts, served on plates of old Meissen and Nymphenburg pocelain at the tables of Royal Highnesses, Duchesses and Ambassadors.'

'Malaparte undoubtedly has a very vivid imagination,' laughed General Guillaume, 'and in his next book you will find our humble camp meal transformed into a regal banquet, while I shall become a kind of Sultan of Morocco.'... "

"My excitation had put me into a sort of delirium, and I'd hardly started passionately licking the point of encounter where these beautiful dead creatures united my desire, when I thought I would die myself and inundated myself, moaning."

"Asked what love is, some reply: It is only a wind whispering among the roses and dying away."

That afternoon, Pereira maintains, he had a dream. It was a beautiful dream about his youth, but he prefers not to relate it, because dreams ought not to be told, he maintains. He will go no farther than to say he was happy, that it was winter and he was on a beach to the north of Coimbra, perhaps at Granja, and that he had with him a person whose identity he does not wish to disclose.

Devaluing the past and the present in favour of times to come, devaluing the real and preferring the virtual reality located in a vague future, are symptoms of European nihilism more decisive than anything that Nietzsche could have come up with.

The liberal doxa persisted in ignoring the problem, in the naive belief that the lure of material gain could be substituted for any other human motivation, and could on its own supply the mental energy necessary for the maintenance of a complex social organisation. This was quite plainly false, and it seemed to Paul that the whole system was going to come crashing down, even if one could not at present predict the date or the manner in which it might occur -- but the date could be close, and the manner violent

Fingers scratching the partition. Two beasts emerging, somewhere between head and belly; substantial food for only one, the third lingering, then leaps and devours everything, the remaining two face each other, which will die, the one above, or the one below? There I've lost interest in being the ring master, but shall I remain the impassive observer? Berg pressed himself against the partition, until it shuddered, and he thought someone coughed the other side, a rasping sound that - why yes unmistakable - and yet?