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En vida padeció de irrealidad, como tantos ingleses; muerto, no es siquiera el fantasma que ya era entonces.

Jorge Luis Borges, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbius Tertius," Ficciones (1941)

All writers have faced the problems of the conflict between coherent development, let us say, and the mere dispersion of energy. All writers, certainly from the Renaissance on, have meditated in language upon the peculiarities of language. [...] Such writers as Wilde, Hopkins, Proust, James, Conrad, and T.E. Lawrence in their works and lives completely transform the text from an object to be gained into an unceasing struggle to be a writer, into what Lawrence called "the everlasting effort to write."

Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975)

I say so because for me, writing--the only possible writing--is just simply the conversion of nervous force into phrases. With you too, I am sure, tho' in your case it is the disciplined intelligence which gives the signal--the impulse. For me it is a matter of chance, stupid chance. But the fact remains that when the nervous force is exhausted the phrases don't come--and no tension of will can help.

Joseph Conrad, "Letter to H.G. Wells" (November 30, 1903)

Thus whatever work is in fact produced suffers from radical uncertainty at the beginning; it is highly unconventional; it possesses its iwn inner dynamic; it is a constantly experienced but strangely impalpable whole partially revealing itself in individual works; it is haunted by antecedence, difference, sameness, and the future; and it never finally accomplishes its ideal aims, at least in its author's opinion. The writer's life, his career, and his text form a system of relationships whose configuration in real human time becomes progressively stronger (i.e., more distinct, more individualized and exacerbated). In fact, these relationships gradually become the writer's all-encompassing subject. On a pragmatic level, then, his text is his statement of the temporal course of his career, inscribed in language, and shot through and through with precisely these matters.

Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975)

Forged in such crucibles of counterinsurgency, the military's information infrastructure has advanced through three distinct technological phases: manual intelligence collection during the Phillipine War; computerized daya management in the war in Vietnam; and, most recently, integrated robotic systems in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Two of the largest CIA covert operations during the Cold War in Central America and Central Asia reveal the complexities of politico-military operations in this murky netherworld. After Soviet troops occupied Kabul and leftist Sandinista guerrillas seized Managua in 1979, the White House responded, first under Jimmy Carter but more decisively under Ronald Reagan, with clandestine operations rather than conventional military intervention. By fighting through surrogates--the Nicaraguan Contras and the Afghan mujahedeen--and tolerating their involvement in the local drug traffic, the CIA catalyzed the formation of covert netherworlds astride the Nicaraguan-Honduran borderlands and the Afghan-Pakistan frontier.

Alfred W. McCoy, In the Shadows of the American : The Rise and Decline of US Global Power (2017)

Although local forms of criminality and clandestine intrigues can be found around the globe and across time, the rise of modern empires was the essential precondition for this covert dominion's transformation from sordid social margin into a significant political space.

Alfred W. McCoy, In the Shadows of the American : The Rise and Decline of US Global Power (2017)

Taking a broader view of this failure, Egypt's respected opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei complained bitterly that, after forty years of US dominion, the Middle East was 'a collection of failed states that add nothing to humanity or science' because 'people were taught not to think or to act, and were consistently given an inferior education.

Alfred W. McCoy, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power (2017)

If the 'velvet revolutions' that swept Eastern Europe in 1989 tolled the death knell for the Soviet Empire, theb the 'jasmine revolutions' that spread fitfully, painfully, violently across the Middle East after 2011 may well contribute, in the fullness of time, to the eclipse of American global power.

Alfred W. McCoy, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power (2017)

In the century from the Spansh-American War to the end of the Cold War, Washington had developed a distinctive form of global governance that incorporated aspects of antecedent empires, ancient and modern. This unique US imperium was Athenian in its ability to forge coalitions among allies; Roman in its reliance on legions that occupied military bases across most of the known world; and British in its aspiration to merge culture, commerce, and alliances into a comprehensive system that covered the globe.

Alfred W. McCoy, In the Shadows of the American Empire: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power (2017)

I must have read somewhere, when I was small and still read, that it is better not to look back when leaving. And yet I sometimes did.

Samuel Beckett, "The End" (1946)

Dr. Coles notes a significant difference between rich and poor children. The poor tend to live in a long unchanging present while the rich have a future to look forward to. For the rich there is always 'next year' when they will go to Switzerland to ski or to the West Indies to scubadive.

Gore Vidal, "Rich Kids" (1978)

Then it happened. While the woman was contemplating the face that she had overlaid with death, she was swept aside by a great storm of sound, shaking the very house with its prolonged triumphant vehemence, climbing in a dizzy, bubbling scale, until, dispersed, it fused into the breath of the forest and the throbbing cry of the sea. They found her caressing his wild dead hair.

Samuel Beckett, “Assumption” (1929)

He drugged himself that he might sleep heavily, silently; he scarcely left his room, scarcely spoke, thus denying even that rare transmutation to the rising tossing soundlessness that seemed now to rend his whole being with the violence of its effort. He felt he was losing, playing into the hands of the enemy by the very severity of his restrictions. By damning the stream of whispers he had raised the level of the flood, and he knew the day would come when it could no longer be denied. Still he was silent, in silence listening for the first murmur of the torrent that must destroy him. At this moment the Woman came to him…. He was listening to the dusk when she came, listening so intently that he did not hear her enter. From the door she spoke to him, and he winced at the regularity of her clear, steady speech. It was the usual story, vulgarly told: admiration for his genius, sympathy with his suffering, only a woman could understand….

Samuel Beckett, “Assumption” (1929)

Suetonius' case history (and it is precisely that) of Domitian is particularly fascinating. An intelligent mann of some charm, trained to govern, Domitian upon succeeding to the principate at first, contented himself with tearing the wings off flies, an infantile pastime which gradually palled until, inevitably, for flies he substituted men. His favorite game was to talk gently of mercy to a nervous victim; then, once all fears had been allayed, execute him.

Gore Vidal, "The Twelve Caesars", United States: Essays 1952-1992 (1998)

Most people wrongly identify themselves with their feelings, thoughts, likes and dislikes. When they feel anger, they think 'I am angry. This is my anger.' They consequently spend their life avoiding some kinds of feelings and pursuing others. They never realize that they are not their feelings, and that the relentless pursuit of particular feelings just traps them in misery.

Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Liberalism sanctifies the subjective feelings of individuals. It views these feelings as the supreme source of authority. What is good and what is bad, what is beautiful and what is ugly, what ought to be and what ought not to be, are all determined by what each one of us feels.

Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2016)

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