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