The Sheltering Sky

"Out here there was no sound but the wind blowing around his head on its way from one part of the earth to another. Whenever the thread of his consciousness had unwound too far and got tangled, a little solitude could wind it quickly back. His state of nervousness was remediable in that it had to do only with himself: he was afraid of his own ignorance. If he desired to cease being nervous he must conceive a situation for himself in which that ignorance had no importance."

Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky, p.131

Herzog

"He might once have had the makings of a clever character, but he had chosen to be dreamy instead, and the sharpies cleaned him out."

"He dreaded the depths of feeling he would eventually have to face, when he could no longer call upon his eccentricities for relief."

"Dear Doktor Professor Heidegger, I should like to know what you mean by the expression "the fall into the quotidian." When did this fall occur? Where were we standing when it happened?"

Saul Bellow, Herzog, pages 3, 10, 49.

Walking my riddels

"Walker is my name and I am the same. Riddley Walker. Walking my riddels where ever theyve took me and walking them now on this paper the same.

I dont think it makes no diffrents where you start the telling of a thing. You never know where it begun realy. No moren you know where you begun your oan self. You myt know the place and day and time of day when you ben beartht. You myt even know the place and day and time when you ben got. That dont mean nothing tho. You stil dont know where you begun."

Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker p.8

always escaping

"At such a distance, the swimmer was always escaping him. He would see him, then lose sight of him, though he had the feeling that he was following his every move: not only perceiving him clearly all the time, but being brought near him in a completely intimate way, such that no other sort of contact could have brought him closer. He stayed a long time, watching and waiting. There was in this contemplation something painful which resembled the manifestation of an excessive freedom, a freedom obtained by breaking every bond."

Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure, from The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, p.57.

unconceptualisable

"While Saussure had gone to great pains to show that language in its most general form could be understood as a system of differences, 'without positive terms', Derrida noted that the full implications of such a conception were not appreciated by either latter-day structuralists, or Saussure himself. Difference without positive terms implies that this dimension in language must always remain unperceived, for strictly speaking, it is unconceptualisable."

John Lechte, Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers, Jacques Derrida p107.