Sublime

The novelist Nicholas Delbanco has remarked that by the age of four one has experienced nearly everything one needs as a writer of fiction: love, pain, loss, boredom, rage, guilt, fear of death. The writer’s business is to make up convincing human beings and create for them basic situations and actions by means of which they come to know themselves

Bien que je sois fasciné par les grands stylistes comme Joyce, Nabokov et Banville, ce sont les grands « raconteurs » – Dickens, Trollop, Hardy, Tchekhov, Murakami, Dostoïevski, Auster, McEwan – que j’adore vraiment.

He is the man whose life seems so under control, until BOOM, one day he does something to destroy it

Adam Appich, master of science, is there with several studies that show how legacy cognitive blindness will forever prevent people from acting in their own best interests.

I must change his trivial misery back into the noble misery it once was.

Thus the hero of the Odyssey is a great fighter, a wily schemer, a ready speaker, a man of stout heart and broad wisdom who knows that he must endure without too much complaining what the gods send; and he can both build and sail a boat, drive a furrow as straight as anyone, beat a young braggart at throwing the discus, challenge the Pheacian youth