"... break the barrier."

"Pursewarden once, speaking about writing, told me that the pain that accompanied composition was entirely due, in artists, to the fear of madness; 'force it a bit and tell yourself that you don't give a damn if you do go mad, and you'll find it comes quicker, you'll break the barrier.'"

Lawrence Durrell, Balthazar, p.15.

"... for nobody knows of me..."

"Nobody will read what I write here, nobody will come to help me; even if there were a commandment to help me, all the doors of all the houses would stay closed, all the windows would stay closed, all the people would lie in their beds with the blankets drawn over their heads, the whole earth one great noctural lodging. And there is sense in that, for nobody knows of me, and if anyone knew of me he would not know where I could be found, and if anyone knew where I could be found he would not know how to help me. The idea of wanting to help me is a sickness, and it has to be cured in bed."

Kafka, The Hunter Gracchus, from Description of a Struggle and Other Stories, p.91

"...she is about to say something..."

"... she is about to say something which her mind has already formulated but which has so far only reached the eyes."

Lawrence Durrell, Justine, p117

"...lack of protection."

"He lacked the sort of protective carapace that other people have, but one has to add that his achievement wouldn't have been possible if he'd had that carapace. So that the lack of a carapace was intimately related - was the same thing, almost - as his talent and his vision and his originality. It's as though in the remorseless tide of life, as he saw it, there are moments of respite, when some small hope can be constructed, some exchange can take place and the poignancy of this also comes from this lack of protection."

John Berger on B S Johnson, from Like A Fiery Elephant, The Story of B S Johnson by Jonathan Coe, p.415

"... a splintery self ..."

Million a tesserae was shattered he
no possible,no with together putting
back . Front,sides,of splinters a spintery
self,remainder of a,a window shutting -
glass that so fell smashed and out look ! fuck damn
on stones the there lay if as malevolent
bare feet for unnoticing - with a slam
eh ? what ? a pieces in man,in a meant
fragments,heart,rags skin instead of a .
Overcasing the state ? was he ? know,you -
mosaic means bits. So do tesserae
before done the work, to make them,what ? do
things together ? Is a ? make do ? to whole
(denied a man in love fragments his soul) .

Ali Smith, The Accidental, p169

for no reason, in no particular order

"A great deal has yet to be told, some of it recent and some still to come, and I need time. But even not knowng what is to come, I do know that whenever the moment arrives I will go on telling it as I have until now, for no reason and in no particular order, without making an outline or seeking coherence; what I tell will not be guided by any author, fundamentally, though I am the person who tells it; it will not correspond to any plan or be ruled by any compass, or have any reason to make sense or add up to an argument or plot, or answer to some hidden harmony, or even be a story with its beginning and its expectation and its final silence. I don't think this is going to be a story, though I may be mistaken since I don't know its ending which may never be put into writing because it will coincide with my own, some years from now, or so I hope."

Javier Marias, Dark Back of Time p.335 (Translated by Esther Allen)

nothing is more foreign to the tree

"Mallarme does not want "to include, upon the subtle paper... the intrinsic and dense wood of trees." But nothing is more foreign to the tree than the word tree, as it is used nonetheless by everyday language. A word which does not name anything, which does not represent anything, which does not outlast itself in any way, a word which is not even a word and which disappears marvelously altogether and at once in its usage: what could be more worthy of the essential and closer to silence? True, it "serves." Apparently that makes all the difference. We are used to it, it is usual, useful. Through it we are in the world: it refers us back to the life of the world where goals speak and the concern to achieve them once and for all is the rule. Granted, this crude word is a pure nothing, nothingness itself. But it is nothingness in action: that which acts, labours, constructs. It is the pure silence of the negative which culminates in the noisy feverishness of tasks."


Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, p39/40.

kicking all support away

"Ondaatje's novels ... use the scaffolding of conventional narrative and then kick all support away to discover what can stand alone and what is manifested in new form."

Alan Warner on Michael Ondaatje's Divisadero, Guardian Review 1.9.07

talking to yourself

"When the American poet John Ashbery was asked why his poems were so difficult he said that he noticed that if you go on talking to people they eventually lose interest, but when you start talking to yourself they want to listen in."

Adam Phillips, Promises, Promises: Prynne Collected p.322