“What else have you underlined?”

”What everybody underlines,” she said. “Everything that says ‘me’.”

~ Philip Roth, “Zuckerman Unbound”

“He misuses [books] quite ruthlessly — despite the respectful way he has to talk about them in public — to put him to sleep, to take his mind off the hands of the clock, to relax the nagging of his pyloric spasm, to gossip him out of his melancholy, to trigger the conditional reflexes of his colon.”

~ Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man

“Creative taxidermy. That’s so much of life, Elisa. Things patched together, without meaning, from which we, in our needful minds, create myths to suit us.”

Daniel Kraus, The Shape of Water

“The concept of the ‘definitive text’ corresponds only to religion or exhaustion.”

~ Jorge Luis Borges, The Homeric Versions

“Irony can never be more than our own personal Maginot line; the drawing of it, for the most part, purely arbitrary.”

~ Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“The literal mind is baffled by the ironic one, demanding explanations that only intensify the joke.”

~ Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian

“What destroys fools? A longing for Art and Beauty...”

Sergei Dovlatov, The Suitcase

“By art one is more deeply satisfied and more rapidly used up.”

Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

“The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication...”

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave