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If a liar tells you he is lying, is he telling the truth?

Shehan Karunatilaka, Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew

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“You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited; some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind.”

— John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

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Never again shall I understand anything I say. Since how could I speak without the word lying for me? How could I speak except timidly like this: life just is for me. Life just is for me, and I don't understand what I'm saying. And so I adore it.

Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

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“I really believe that no matter how old people get, they tend to change in certain ways depending on how people treat them — they change their colors.”

— Banana Yoshimoto, Asleep

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The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through. Most people had not lived — nor could it, for that matter, be said that they had died — through any of their terrible events. They had simply been stunned by the hammer. They passed their lives thereafter in a kind of limbo of denied and unexamined pain. The great question that faced him this morning was whether or not had had ever, really, been present at his life.

James Baldwin, Another Country

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“From those of us who are left behind: you will be remembered, you were the one I needed, I loved you in my dreams.”

— Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park

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Your eyes aren't empty mirrors — you reflect human beings. I hope this doesn't make you mortally unhappy.

Yōko Tawada, Memoirs of a Polar Bear

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“It really was extremely sudden, the way it struck him that, good heavens, he understood nothing, nothing at all about anything, for Christ’s sake, nothing at all about the world, which was a most terrifying realization, he said, especially the way it came to him in all its banality, vulgarity, at a sickeningly ridiculous level, but this was the point, he said, the way that he, at age 44, had become aware of how utterly stupid he seemed to himself, how empty, how utterly blockheaded he had been in his understanding of the world these last 44 years, for, as he realized by the river, he had not only misunderstood it, but had not understood anything about anything, the worst part being that for 44 years he thought he had understood it, while in reality he had failed to do so…”

— László Krasznahorkai, War & War

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We move from one invisibility to another.

Ali Smith, Spring

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“There was no one as good as he at using the ovens of logic to bake agreeable results.”

— William T. Vollmann, Fathers and Crows

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She said she hoped she would see me again, and the next thing I knew I was running through light snow back to my dorm, laughing aloud from an excess of joy like the schoolboy that I was. I had overwhelming sense of the world's possibility and plenitude; the massive, luminous spheres burned above me without irony; the streetlights were haloed and I could make out the bright, crustal highlands of the moon, the far-sprinkled systems; I was going to read everything and invent a new prosody and successfully court the radiant progeny of the vanguard doyens if it killed me; my mind and body were as a fading coal awakened to transitory brightness by her breath when she'd brushed her lips against me; the earth was beautiful beyond all change.

Ben Lerner, 10:04

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“Guilt wants to cover all the bases, be everywhere at once, reach into the past to tweak, neaten and repair. Guilt like Tourettic utterance flows uselessly, inelegantly from one helpless human to another, contemptuous of perimeters, doomed to be mistaken or refused on delivery.”

— Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn

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I became aware that the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy, love.

Gabriel García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores

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“Without the reading, there is no possibility of writing worth the name, skillful, creative, or otherwise.”

— Samuel R. Delany, “On Creativity and Academic Writing”

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The ocean beyond like a canyon of woe, tumbling and icy all day and night, was so thunderous, I pictured God himself emerging from the water, laughing at us all in spite.

Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen

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“A heart has no shape, no limits. That’s why you can put almost any kind of thing in it, why it can hold so much. It’s much like your memory, in that sense.”

— Yōko Ogawa, The Memory Police

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Wedlock: it had a dull metallic sound, like an iron door clicking shut.

Margaret Atwood, The Testaments

#literature #quotes #Margaret Atwood #The Testaments #quote #books #lit