On the other hand, as soon as a soul has morality or religion, philosophy, and intensive bourgeois education and ideals in the realms of duty and of the beautiful, it is endowed with a system of regulations, conditions and directives for operation, which it has to fill out before it is entitled to think of itself as a respectable soul, and its heat, like that of a blast-furnace, is conducted into beautiful squares of sand. What remains then is fundamentally only logical problems of interpretation, of the kind as to whether an action comes under this or that commandment; and the soul presents the tranquil panorama of a battlefield after the battle, where the dead lie quiet and one can at once observe where a scrap of life yet stirs or groans. And so man makes this transition as fast as he can. If he is tormented by religious doubts, as occasionally happens in youth, he goes straight over to the persecution of unbelievers; if love deranges him, he turns it into marriage; and if other enthusiasm overwhelms him, he disentangles himself from the impossibility of living perpetually in the fire of it by beginning to live for that fire. That is, instead of filling the many moments of his day, each of which needs a content and an impetus, with his ideal state, he fills them with the activity for the sake of his ideal state, in other words, with the many means to the end, the hindrances and incidents that are a sure guarantee that he never need reach it. For only fools, the mentally deranged, and people with idees fixes, can endure unceasingly in the fire of the soul’s rapture. A sane man must content himself with declaring that life would not seem worth living without a flake of that mysterious fire. p. 219

But it is along this road that business leads to philosophy (for it is only criminals who presume to damage other people nowadays without the aid of philosophy) p227

Most of us may not believe in the story of a Devil to whom one can sell one's soul, but those who must know something about the soul (considering that as clergymen, historians, and artists they draw a good income from it) all testify that the soul has been destroyed by mathematics and that mathematics is the source of an evil intelligence that while making man the lord of the earth has also made him the slave of his machines. The inner drought, the dreadful blend of acuity in matters of detail and indifference toward the whole, man's monstrous abandonment in a desert of details, his restlessness, malice, unsurpassed callousness, moneygrubbing, coldness, and violence, all so characteristic of our times, are by these accounts solely the consequence of damage done to the soul by keen logical thinking! Even back when Ulrich first turned to mathematics there were already those who predicted the collapse of European civilization because no human faith, no love, no simplicity, no goodness, dwelt any longer in man. These people had all, typically, been poor mathematicians as young people and at school.

Perhaps not all of these people believe in that stuff about the Devil to whom one can sell one’s soul; but all those who have to know something about the soul, because they draw a good income out of it as clergy, historians or artists, bear witness to the fact that it has been ruined by mathematics and that in mathematics is the source of a wicked intellect that, while making man the lord of the earth, also makes him the slave of the machine. The inner drought, the monstrous mixture of acuity in matters of detail and indifference as regards the whole, man’s immense loneliness in a desert of detail, his restlessness, malice, incomparable callousness, his greed for money, his coldness and violence, which are characteristic of our time, are, according to such surveys, simply and solely the result of the losses that logical and accurate thinking has inflicted upon the soul! And so it was that even at that time, when Ulrich became a mathematician, there were people who were prophesying the collapse of European civilisation on the grounds that there was no longer any faith, any love, any simplicity or any goodness left in mankind; and it is significant that these people were all bad at mathematics at school.

The thing about matryoshkas, Mujae announced while he grated the radish, is that they’re hollow to begin with. There’s nothing inside of any substance. There’s just one matryoshka inside another, that repetition is itself what defines a matryoshka, not any actual object part, so in fact it’s more precise to say that a matryoshka contains an eternal recurrence than a number of smaller matryoshkas. So it’s not as though anything has ceased to exist because it broke; all we’ve done is confirmed that it never existed in the first place.
That sounds so futile, Mujae.
Futility is precisely why I’ve always thought that a matryoshka resembles human life.

He holds a candle and the candle is white and its flame ducks down again and again as if to avoid something or many things flying about them fast and low up and down the passageway

More than once I’ve imagined taking the bloodstained tissue into a department store, up to the Chanel counter, the Dior counter, the Lancôme counter, and saying ‘Look, this is the red, this is it, this is the most perfect red in the world. Let me see a lipstick at long last in this most perfect shade of red.��

it vexed me that the marvellous mishmash of glad rags and clandestine accoutrements that came to mind whenever I thought about Tarquin Superbus would ultimately undermine the credibility of my story if I set them all down, but set them down I did, all the same, anachronism upon anachronism, because it was immensely enjoyable for one thing and �� historical incongruence notwithstanding �� it seemed to me that such details lent the tale so much atmosphere and intrigue.

It was exciting, standing in the girls�� toilets during lesson time all on my own surrounded by small shining white tiles with blood drying on the inside of my thighs and another girl’s clean pair of knickers in my hands. It made me think of the First World War, though many things then made me think of the First World War.

I’ve always been very taken with aubergines, with the way they are so tightly sheathed in a shining bulletproof darkness. When I was a dismayed student in London I often fantasised about hanging a great many aubergines from the square ceiling of my sketchy boudoir. Imagine lying there beneath such a pendulous chandelier of lambent gloom �� imagine the transporting reflections slipping across their sleek hermetic skins, the assuaging shadows they’d cast as degradation tipped them into slow stately revolutions, the whisperings, the whisperings, the sighs, the melancholy glow.

Who knows what would come out of my mouth as I stood out of time. Perhaps I am a nun in the north of Italy rinsing out skeins and skeins of bandages and outside in the woods tired filthy men are advancing and shooting at one another from behind dripping trees and they shall all be halted in their deplorable tracks the moment they hear me sing.

If Tarquin Superbus is licking his fingers and thumbs chances are he is in Vienna. It is also Vienna when Tarquin and the Doctor are sat in a relaxed sort of way, amiably discussing perhaps a light piece of conservatoire news. If there is a bevy of hen’s eggs squelching away in a pan of oil on a small squat stove on the other hand then Tarquin Superbus most certainly is in Venice.

The briefest love is also sometimes the longest love

We felt ageless in fact. In fact we felt all the ages we’ve ever been all at once.

"They make swimming motions, in order to ascertain, perhaps, that there is water [...] they frantically hope that they will stumble and fall, for this would mean that stones were there, which might indicate the existence of a mountain."

"He asks me if the sea will leave if there is war, and when I say no, he is satisfied."

We have toppled
the tree, have chased
the tree through autumn,
have hung it with hailstones and snow:

we have dried the rivers
and counted the water,
have held the wave up to the light,
and have weighed the flow
in the fountain:

we thought we could capture
the owl, feathers it shed
was all we held, we copied
the owl's talk in our language,
which says: The moon
is a desiccated sun!

“to transform wisdom, even as it is, into a theory of life, and so to extract some ‘content�� from the motion of those who were moved: what is left over is about as much as remains of a jelly-fish’s delicately opalescent body after it has been lifted out of the water and laid on the sand. The teachings of the inspired crumble into dust in the rationality of the uninspired, crumble into contradiction and nonsense.��

“Don’t erase things from the world just because you are incapable of imagining them.��

A misuteri, she says, mystery, a sort of black hole. And in that family, the black hole happens to be the chamber pot. They may even be aware that the chamber pot is their version of the unknowable. Or maybe they’ve never even thought about it along these lines �� but even so, the point is that some things are impossible to comprehend.

"That's what family means to him: no longer counting as other people."