#literary condition

[literarycondition]

It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain    

[literarycondition]

How small life is here and how big nothingness. The sky, tired of light, has given everything to the snow. The two trees bow their heads to each other. Clouds cross the world’s silence in a circle dance

Robert Walser (Oppressive Light: Selected Poems by Robert Walser)              

[literarycondition]

What is meant by 'reality'? It would seem something very erratic, very undependable-now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now in a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech-and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Picadilly.

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

[literarycondition]

One short man said: "I would give anything if only I were even a tiny bit taller." He barely said it when he saw a lady magician standing in front of him. "What do you want?" says the magician. But the short man just stands there so frightened he can't even speak. "Well?" says the magician. The short man just stands there and says nothing. The magician vanishes. Then the short man started crying and biting his nails. First he chewed off all the nails on his fingers, and then on his toes. Reader! Think this fable over and it will make you somewhat uncomfortable.

Daniil Kharms, Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings           

[literarycondition]

“Much less evil would be done on earth if evil could not be done in the name of good.”

Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach

[literarycondition]

Whereas I think: I’m lying here in a haystack... The tiny space I occupy is so infinitesimal in comparison with the rest of space, which I don’t occupy and which has no relation to me. And the period of time in which I’m fated to live is so insignificant beside the eternity in which I haven’t existed and won’t exist... And yet in this atom, this mathematical point, blood is circulating, a brain is working, desiring something... What chaos! What a farce!

Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, Fathers and Sons    

[literarycondition]

Kindness. The only possible method when dealing with a living creature. You'll get nowhere with an animal if you use terror, no matter what its level of development may be. That I have maintained, do maintain and always will maintain. People who think you can use terror are quite wrong. No, no, terror is useless, whatever its colour – white, red or even brown! Terror completely paralyses the nervous system.

Mikhail Bulgakov, Heart of a Dog    

[literarycondition]

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.

Philip K. Dick, How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later