All he ever wanted was to be important! His life became a campaign to make himself exalted and canonical in the eyes of others. He was therefore able to make himself as ridiculous as a human being can be without actually becoming a professional clown.



Who can possibly tell a saint he is wrong?



Destiny is the shining bauble we use to trap the suckers.



He's a journalist. He's gifted with the capacity to see the social context for music making, and the social causation involved in generating new musical forms. As for what happens before a musical style becomes a mass movement, he has no idea: he's not privy to such turnings.



She used to feel she was the ruler of the town, but now it becomes clear that the ruler has died, and the tower is empty, so who is she? Now she is one of the townspeople, as they gather in the streets, arguing what to do; but she is not sure which one.




He has locked the basement door and plugged his ears so he cannot hear the unearthly sounds. Next, he will go around the world selling his method to the highest bidder. Creatures of the underworld instinctively despise him. How long will he survive?




An epigone sets up a stage in the market. People flock around to praise him. They are reminded of the greatness of the master, and in the delerium of their pleasure, welcome the thief.




A prophet of honour appeared to me in a dream and said, I have gazed without flinching upon all the hells to which the ungrateful are dispatched, but I could not gaze for a second upon that hell which is reserved for the devout.




Driving things to an extreme, you make unique lies.




Not desiring fame in this lifetime, they work hard at their craft and attempt to see it through to completion, dodging bullets. Are they wasting their lives? In the opinion of their peers, yes. The opinion of their successors is harder to estimate. All they really want is the gentle creature pleasure of dying in contemplation of their unvarnished works. They are not so interested in the living hell of being observed and judged throughout their lives by strangers.




She said, ‘Hands-off easygoing tolerance is most effective for handling demons. After that, violence is best.’




She desires to know what's going on in his head. He says, without reevoking anything, 'Nothing of great consequence'. She smiles and says she does not believe him, but he is telling the truth, as by not recalling his thoughts, he has made it true.




When an intellect is too weary to deduce, it thinks in apothegms. A dog under a tree, it raises its head, whines to no-one in particular, then rests its head, thinking of nothing.





To the potential mass murderer, insoluble prolems often appear as challenging opportunities.




Through constant complaint he is able to create a simulacrum of a raft, an illusion of continuity of consciousness, the vanity of which is obvious even to him, thereby creating further grounds for complaint.




'Don't tell me you are well', he says. 'I only want to hear from sick people. How can you, being well, understand my misery?' This is his reasoning. Even now, he is conversing with his sick friends, and they are engrossed with themselves and their unifying misery.





I suppose the mental torment you feel is caused by a recoil from the physicality of your love for this person, which is intense and unnerving.





"I like your stories", I told her, "Because they have no specific meaning and allow me, the reader, to exercise my imagination and understand them in any way I like". "On the contrary", she told me, "My stories have only one meaning. There is no room for your imagination, and only one way they may be understood; also, the meaning is always the same".





If he truly understands the nature of change, he will be out of a job.





The body reaches a precipice and halts. It turns right around. It wanders along the edge, then returns to its original spot. It waits. It squints at the sun. It scratches itself. Suddenly, it jumps.





The cosmos threw him a bouquet: he accepted it gratefully, because he knew that this was his third and final offer.





And now she is invaded by a shadow which eases itself out to her toenails and fingertips, hollowing her out inside, making her body its own, for she is about to die. She digests everything into her particular sensibility, which is simply to make the tussle with life a meaningful and constructive enterprise, with not a little dark channelling activity, and that is why I like her style. So, if she is to die, it will be without a feeling of persecution. Idly, I find myself contemplating another friend who feels persecuted when he loses his keys, and wonder how he will feel when his time comes.





She knows that one day she will climb a mountain, rest her head on a rock, and die without a second thought, and this will confuse her loved ones, whose tears will not move her: she will not understand their tears. She will forget everything she has ever done, and all her attention will be focused on the gathering dark.





Anonymity jealously rules inspiration.





In his dream, she was black, haughty, and stood with her foot on the severed head of a wolf. This is what she told him:
"The trickster works through one person, against another. The mode of action is unmasking. The unmasking creates surprise in those who expect and depend upon solidity and the perseverance of form. They depend on such illusions to preserve their sanity, or so they believe; but it is this belief which actually undermines their sanity.
"The trickster only manifests against a person subject to that delusion. To a person not subject to that delusion, he is a principle of embodied action, not a person or deity. According to that principle, the trickster is simply a facet of reality, the fact of change, applied within the locus of personality and social world. Those who understand this principle have a way of appearing and disappearing, changing shape, and so on, without any apparent regrets.
"The difference between the trickster and the psychopath is not as subtle as it might first appear. The psychopath defends and maintains his pleasure at all costs. The trickster defends nothing: not even the principle of non-defending. For this reason, the psychopath more closely resembles the normal person as defined by our society than does the trickster."





One day during a walk in the woods, a leech attached itself to his ankle and began to suck. Or was it that a troll appeared in his bedroom, and began to follow him around, eating his food, stealing his seat and occluding his view of the world? The leech drank its fill and eventually dropped off; or was it that the troll became bored, found an easy prey, wandered off, lost sight of him in the shadows? Later, she asked him, why did you put up with that leech, or was it a troll? Why did you put up with it for so long? And all he could say was, I did not have it in my heart to remove the leech, or the troll. It needed my blood; or was it that it needed my company, my food, my seat, or my view?





She reflects on the gentle sweetness she feels when dissolving her past; there is something fearsome in it.





'At first, he told her, 'my stories are made up to pass the time. Before too long, the moon appears and they are suddenly recondite with hidden meaning. It is not long, though, before they seem, in a flash, utterly redundant. Later still, they wander back into your life, like sleepwalkers.'





She wakes in the night shouting, 'Whose voice is that?' Then she laughs. She has to explain to me that it is only the punchline of a joke, the point of which she has already forgotten.





I said, at first I liked the way you went hither, but now, on reflection, considering all the relevant facts, in the light of experience, perhaps you should go thither. And you said, aah, you might be right. Then I said, do you think, wouldn't it be best, wouldn't it be the sensible or perhaps the crazy thing to do? And you said, maybe, you could be right about that, I don't know. Then I said, but there's something there that shouldn't be, or maybe it isn't there but should be. Or really, no, it's more that it's too difficult, the project is too big, you will fail, or, no, it's that the project is too small, you are hemmed in, or I am hemmed in by you. And you said, it could be that way, who can tell?





First of all she found herself skim reading books, taking in great chunks of text in one hit, judging in a second whether there was anything there. Later, she found she was also skim reading conversations, allowing her mind to skip over small-talk, bustle, gossip, cant, and shop talk. Now, she is amazed to find herself skim reading reality, passing over almost everything. From time to time, she is galvanised; at other times she is quiescent, mentally somnolent or blurry; for she now considers attention a resource.





All depends on who gets to tell our history.




Malevolent, he is denied space in her world, and has become ruthless, breaking in through the windows of her bedroom while she sleeps, giving her nightmares.





He has often thought that if, in an autocratic state, he were asked to adopt some religious or ideological stance, he would happily do so to avoid persecution; and that such a recanting would be neither consistent with, nor inconsistent with, his world view.





She is accustomed to modelling her own thoughts in the body, even looking in the mirror as she does so, the better to articulate in skin each inner being. One evening, her lover accuses her of being priggish at a party attending by a number of relaxed, young, well-moneyed academics of no great note. This is unexpected, as she always feels tremorously raw and unpretentious, and never shares her humility with anyone, since, logically enough, humility does not parade.
Thinking back, she realises her unconscious modelling has slipped over the borders of her personality. She was modelling, not her own concealed attitudes, but theirs, like a king's fool. She wonders what they thought of her? What did they think of themselves? Unlike them, she gave up teaching years ago, yet cannot stop driving these wicked pins into peoples' hearts, even against her own will.