"Over the next century, scholars and fans, aided by computational algorithms, will knit together the books of the world into a single networked literature. A reader will be able to generate a social graph of an idea, or a timeline of a concept, or a networked map of influence for any notion in the library. We’ll come to understand that no work, no idea, stands alone, but that all good, true and beautiful things are networks, ecosystems of intertwingled parts, related entities and similar works."

TheTechium

“That lunch hour, which lasts not one hour but two or even three, is a very important feature of French culture. It gives the poorer employee time to go home and have a leisurely meal; it provides the more affluent with the opportunity to stop at a café for apéritifs, go on to a restaurant and eat slowly (to the accompaniment of conversation, not a program of canned music), and to proceed afterward to another café for coffee; or perhaps, weather permitting, even to stroll in a park. For Paris is a city whose customs have evolved from a serious application of the theory that life is meant above all to be lived, and not dedicated to some ulterior abstract concept. It is a city designed to be lived in, not to be used as a market or workshop. And since living, no matter on how much or how little money, is always an art, it is not surprising that the artists should appear to have mastered it more successfully than any other group.”

Travels

~Paul Bowles

"If possible we meet again sometime and I’ll tell you about the gypsy shrouds, pull out the crystal meaning balls, and show you the secrets of the magic saints and the radiant perfumed hands of the Tathagatas that may one day be laid in a wheel shimmering upon your awakened brow, if I have anything to do with it before I lost myself in the recognition that I have no self, no ego, and therefore can no longer act as “I"

Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters

"He has pointed out a young lady to you. She is there between two rows of bookshelves in the shop, looking among the Penguin Modern Classics, running a lovely and determined finger over the pale aubergine-colored spines. Huge, swift eyes, complexion of good tone and good pigment, a richly waved haze of hair."

If on a Winters Night a Traveller

~Italo Calvino

"I rather enjoy that sense of bewilderment a novel gives you when you start reading it, but if the first effect is fog, I’m afraid the moment the fog lifts my pleasure in reading will be lost, too."

If on a Winters Night a Traveller

~Italo Calvino

"Finally the Work journeys irremediably alone in the Great Vastness. And one day the Work dies, as all things must die and come to an end: the Sun and the Earth and the Solar System and the Galaxy and the farthest reaches of man’s memory. Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragedy."

The Savage Detectives

~Roberto Bolaño

"We both liked Cortázar, we both liked Borges, neither of us had much money, and we both spoke shitty Portuguese. Basically, we were the typical forty-something Latin American guys who find themselves in an African country on the edge of the abyss or the edge of collapse."

The Savage Detectives

Roberto Bolaño

"A special kind of silence prevailed, a silence that figures neither in musical nor in philosophical dictionaries, as if time were coming apart and flying off in different directions simultaneously, a pure time, neither verbal nor composed of gestures and actions."

Amulet

~Roberto Bolaño

“Read so hard libraries trying to find me”

“What is thingness?” La Maga asked. 

“Thingness is that unpleasant feeling that where our presumption ends our punishment begins. I’m sorry I have to use abstract and almost allegorical language, but I mean that Oliveira is pathologically sensitive to the pressure of what is around him, the world he lives in, his fate, to speak kindly. In a word he can’t stand his surroundings. More briefly, he has a world-ache.” 

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” ~ Faulkner

“”By style, I mean color,” he said. “I want to be able to do anything with words: handle slashing, flaming descriptions like Wells, and use paradox with the clarity of Samuel Butler, the breadth of Bernard Shaw and the wit of Oscar Wilde. I want to do the wide sultry heavens of Conrad, the rolled-gold sundowns and crazy-quilt skies of Hichens and Kipling as well as the pastel dawns and twilights of Chesterton. All that is by way of example. As a matter of fact I am a professed literary thief, hot after the best methods of every writer in my generation.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald interviewing F. Scott Fitzgerald.

"Why were we fired up with glorious dreams of achievement leading to such appalling waste?"

Saul Bellow