Literary Ruin

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.

[literaryruin]

... the rich wreak havoc on the poor, by the methods through which they got rich. The mainstream media generally tells stories of violence as sudden events that cause immediate pain. There is a cut with the goo and the spillage. If public attention doesn't stick around long enough to witness what comes after the blood has been wiped off the streets, then what about suffering delayed by many decades? Slow violence ... ‘occurs gradually and out of sight’.

- Jessica Gaitán Johannesson, The Nerves and Their Endings, pp.12

[literaryruin]

On long, lonely nights when your fears crawl over your brain like cockroaches and you can’t get to sleep, dream of the time you were loved — in another lifetime, one of toil and blood. Remember how it felt to find shelter in someone’s arms. Hope that you’ll find it again.

- Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love, pp.163

[literaryruin]

I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me. A nearby field, a ray of sunshine, a little bit of calm along with a bit of bread, not to feel oppressed by the knowledge that I exist, not to demand anything from others, and not to have others demand anything from me - this was denied me, like the spare change we might deny a beggar not because we're mean-hearted but because we don't feel like unbuttoning our coat.

- Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, p.16

[literaryruin]

I asked myself: Haven't you always done your best with whatever you were up against? Haven't you given it your all, whatever came your way? Unfortunately, no. That's not how things had been for me. I had faked it the whole way. In all those years of doing whatever I was told to do, I had convinced myself that I was doing something consequential, in order to make excuses for myself, as I was doing right now, and perpetually dismissed the fact that I'd done nothing with my life, glossing over it all. I was so scared of being hurt that I'd done nothing. I was so scared of failing, of being hurt, that I chose nothing. I did nothing.

- Mieko Kawakami, All the Lovers in the Night, pp.185

[literaryruin]

“As a matter of fact, Gould hated Chopin,” Mitsutsuka said. “His performances were only ever about one thing: humanity. The human condition. Nothing about light or anything else. I like Gould, but as I get older, I find myself less and less interested in listening to him.”

“The humanity’s too much for you?”

“Something like that.”

- Mieko Kawakami, All the Lovers in the Night, pp.144

[literaryruin]

‘Oh, I can see what you’re trying to say it is,’ she said. ‘Something like a concentration camp. But are you really saying they have such things in the Soviet Union?’

‘Um,’ I stumbled, ‘well, yes.’

‘But how can it be?’ she asked in obvious distress. ‘The USSR is so helpful to third world countries. How can it be doing things like this?’

There is a kind of innocence abroad in Nicaragua. One of the problems with the romance of the word ‘revolution’ is that it can carry with it a sort of blanket approval of all self-professed revolutionary movements.

- Salman Rushdie, The Jaguar Smile, pp.100

[literaryruin]

I often had the feeling that everyone who mattered had already died and been immortalized in the names of hospitals, schools, theatres, highways or even an entire town. In classical Greece, heroes could aspire to the status of gods, or at least hope to be turned into constellations, but the dead of an impoverished twentieth-century country had to make do with this kore prosaic, public-park or sports-stadium immortality.

- Salman Rushdie, The Jaguar Smile, pp.18.

[literaryruin]

I was myself the child of a successful revolt against a great power, my consciousness the product of the triumph of the Indian revolution. It was perhaps also true that those of us who did not have our origins in the countries of the mighty West, or North, had something in common — not, certainly, anything as simplistic as a unified ‘third world’ outlook, but at least some knowledge of what weakness was like, some awareness of the view from underneath, and of how it felt to be there, on the bottom, looking up at the descending heel.

- Salman Rushdie, The Jaguar Smile, pp.12.

[literaryruin]

My father was undemonstrative, and could neither share his feelings with his children nor deal with the feelings we had for him. For a long time I believed there must be a wealth of undiscovered treasure behind that uncommunicative manner, but later I wondered if there was anything behind it at all. Perhaps he had been full of emotions as a boy and a young man, and by giving them no outlet had allowed them over the years to wither and die.

- Bernhard Schlink, The Reader, pp.138

[literaryruin]

‘Don’t you remember how furious you would get as a little boy when Mama knew best what was good for you? It is a philosophical problem,  but philosophy does not concern itself with children. It leaves them to pedagogy, but they are not in very good hands. Philosophy has forgotten about children.’ He smiled at me. ‘Forgotten them forever, not just sometimes, the way I forget about you.’

- Bernhard Schlink, The Reader, pp.140

[literaryruin]

Sometimes I had the feeling that all of us in his family were like pets to him. The dog you take for a walk, the cat you play with and that curls up in your lap,  purring, to be stroked — you can be fond of them, you can even need them to a certain extent, and nonetheless the whole thing — buying pet food, cleaning up the cat box, and trips to the vet — is really too much. Your life is elsewhere. I wish that we, his family, had been his life.

- Bernhard Schlink, The Reader, pp.28.

[literaryruin]

দার্শনিক মহলে — কুমারিল বলেছেন একরকম লোক-ঠকানো কায়দা চালু আছে। বলবার কথাটা যত দুর্বল, কায়দাটার চাহিদাও তত বেশি। বলবার কথায় যদি ফাঁকি থাকে তাহলে নেহাত সাদমাটা ভাষায় তা বললে তো সহজে ধরা পড়ে যাবার ভয়। জমকালো ভাষায় মারপ্যাঁচ কষলে বরং কিছুটা নিরাপত্তা থাকে: সাধারণ লোকে হকচকিয়ে যাবে, ভাববে ব্যাপারটাই বুঝি এমন গভীর যে থই পাওয়া চারটিখানি কথা নয়।

- দেবীপ্রসাদ চট্টোপাধ্যায়, ভারতে বস্ত্তবাদ প্রসঙ্গে

[literaryruin]

I am glass, clear empty glass … No gesture can touch me. I’ve been dropped into all this from another world and I can’t speak your language any longer … I feel like a window, maybe a broken window. I am a glass human. I am a glass human disappearing in the rain. I am standing among all of you waving my invisible arms and hands. I am shouting my invisible words … I am disappearing. I am disappearing but not fast enough.

- Olivia Laing, The Lonely City, pp.209-210.

[literaryruin]

How to configure the transition or translation, the monumental change? In the suddenly empty room he tried to speak to whatever spirit was hovering, perhaps afraid, but found himself unable to find the right words or make the needful gesture, saying at last helplessly, ‘I want some kind of grace.’

- Olivia Laing, The Lonely City, pp.199

[literaryruin]

Considering that stigmatisation is a process designed to deny contact, to separate and shun; considering that it always serves to dehumanise and deindividualise, reducing a person from a human being to the bearer of an unwanted attribute or trait, it is not surprising that one of its main consequences is loneliness, which is further accelerated by shame, the two things amplifying and driving one another.

- Olivia Laing, The Lonely City, pp.190

[literaryruin]

… for her, life was as cold as an attic with a window looking to the north, and ennui, like a spider, was silently spinning its shadowy web in every cranny of her heart.

- Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

[literaryruin]

… what the physiological account of loneliness elides is the part taken by society itself in policing and perpetuating exclusion, rejecting the unwieldy and strange. This is the other driver of loneliness, the reason why certain people — often the most vulnerable and needy of connection — find themselves permanently on the threshold, if not cast entirely beyond the pale.

- Olivia Laing, The Lonely City, pp.153