Index of Quotations

Every quotation recorded for a book, grouped by book. Each was checked against the book’s own text on the day it was used.

Means Without End: Notes on Politics (‘Notes on Gesture’)

• “By the end of the nineteenth century, the Western bourgeoisie had definitely lost its gestures.” (p. 49)
• “Patients can neither start nor complete the simplest of gestures.” (p. 51)
• “In the cinema, a society that has lost its gestures tries at once to reclaim what it has lost and to record its loss.” (p. 53)
• “An age that has lost its gestures is, for this reason, obsessed by them.” (p. 53)
• “each single gesture becomes a destiny.” (p. 53)
• “Cinema leads images back to the homeland of gesture.” (p. 56)
• “What characterizes gesture is that in it nothing is being produced or acted, but rather something is being endured and supported.” (p. 57)
• “The gesture is the exhibition of a mediality” (p. 58)
• “it is always a gag in the proper meaning of the term, indicating first of all something that could be put in your mouth to hinder speech, as well as in the sense of the actor’s improvisation meant to compensate a loss of memory or an inability to speak.” (p. 59)
• Derived list: roll call of the lost gesture (Balzac to Beckett)
• Other: glossary (facere, agere, gerere, res gesta, mediality, gag, coupes mobiles)

The Omnibus Homo Sacer (‘The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath’)

• “The oath does not in any way constitute a remedy against the “Indo-European scourge”; instead, the scourge itself is contained within it in the form of perjury.” (p. 306 / PDF 315)
• “The oath seems, then, to result from the conjunction of three elements: an affirmation, the invocation of the gods as witnesses, and a curse directed at perjury.” (p. 324 / PDF 333)
• “The name of the god, which signifies and guarantees the juncture between words and things, is transformed into a curse if this relation is broken. What is essential, in every case, is the co-originarity of blessing and curse, which are constitutively copresent in the oath.” (p. 328 / PDF 337)
• “The oath is not a conditional curse: on the contrary, the curse and its symmetrical pendant, the blessing, are born as specific institutions from the division of the experience of speech that was in question in the oath.” (p. 333 / PDF 342)
• “It is from the oath—or, better, from perjury—that magic and spells are born: the formula of truth, when broken, is transformed into an efficacious curse” (p. 333 / PDF 342)
• “law and religion are born, both of which seek to tie speech to things and to bind, by means of curses and anathemas, speaking subjects to the veritative power of their speech” (p. 345 / PDF 354)
• “Every naming is, in fact, double: it is a blessing or a curse.” (p. 353 / PDF 362)
• “Precisely because, unlike other living things, in order to speak, the human being must put himself at stake in his speech, he can, for this reason, bless and curse, swear and perjure.” (p. 355 / PDF 364)

Cotton Tenants: Three Families

• “a third grade geography textbook belonging to Lucile Burroughs, aged ten, daughter of a cotton tenant.” (Introduction)
• “Human life, we must assume in the first place, is somewhat more important than anything else in human life, except, possibly, what happens to it.” (Introduction)
• “a calendar advertising Peters Shoes, depicting a pretty girl in a red hat, cuddling red flowers. Title: Cherie. Subtitle (written twice, in pencil): Lucile.” (ch. 2, Shelter)
• “his features just a little exaggerated beyond that square-chiseled head which the commercial artist Leyendecker sets up as Goodlooking” (ch. 1, Business)
• “Real Life Readers—New Stories and Old. A Third Reader. (With color photographs about as real-life as color photographs get.)” (ch. 7, Education)
• “There are very, very few newspapers or magazines. What there are, are saved. The covers and pretty pictures are pasted on the walls; the children save and look at the comic sections over and over.” (ch. 8, Leisure)
• “The infiltration of all that has to do with the outside world is slow, verbal, and distorted in transit.” (ch. 8, Leisure)

An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter

• “the secret aim of this long voyage, which consumed his youth, was Argentina: the mysterious emptiness to be found on the endless plains at a point equidistant from the horizons.” (≈4%)
• “What mattered to Rugendas, however, was not at the end of the line but at its impossible midpoint.” (≈26%)
• “(why was it called El Monigote: The Puppet?)” (≈35%)
• “he felt as if they were removing all the threads that had controlled the puppets of his feelings, or the expressions that manifested them, which came to the same thing.” (≈45%)
• “how could he communicate the proposition ‘I am a monster’?” (≈52%)
• “Rugendas was so absorbed that his only reaction was to write BANG BANG on his sheet of paper.” (≈76%)
• “Humboldt’s procedure was, in fact, a system of mediations: physiognomic representation came between the artist and nature.” (≈88%)
• “In the beginning was Repetition, and only there.” (≈94%)
• “A bat coming in the opposite direction brushed gently against his forehead.” (≈95%)
• “The procedure went on operating through him. Standing behind him, hidden in the shadows, the faithful Krause kept watch.” (last lines)

Baku: Symphony of Sirens. Sound Experiments in the Soviet Avant-Garde

• “Avraamov did not want spectators, but intended the active participation of everybody in the development of the work through their exclamations and singing, all united with the same revolutionary will.” (PDF p. 22)
• “Music has, among all the arts, the highest power of social organisation.” (PDF p. 22)
• “Every morning, a chaotic industrial roar gags the people.” (PDF p. 23)
• “-The midday cannon has been cancelled.” (PDF p. 23)
• “This would be a way to oust the church bells of the old culture and to replace them with the working roar of the sirens, the very timbre of which is so close to the proletarian heart.” (PDF p. 74)
• “in order to give the impression of an old film, of the sound-memory of a recording that was never made.” (PDF p. 62)
• “the melodies becoming completely unrecognizable to the masses” (PDF p. 73)

In the Second Degree: Paratextual Literature in Ancient Near Eastern and Ancient Mediterranean Culture and Its Reflections in Medieval Literature

• “Before the inauguration of kings in Alexandria and in Pergamon, who competed with each other in gathering old books, there was not a work with a faked title” (Galen via Lange, p. 3 [PDF 18])
• “In contemporary scholarship, pseudepigraphy is regarded as the ascription of a literary work to another author by way of title, content, or tradition.” (Lange, p. 4 [PDF 19])
• “the tendency for authors not to ‘assert’ their composition, but rather to attribute it to a prestigious antecedent.” (Loprieno via Lange, p. 7 [PDF 22])
• “Another trait of the corpus is the reference to historical events from the fictional time of composition, a well known phenomenon in literary forgery” (Smolak, p. 226 [PDF 241])
• “It was not considered that the latter wrote in Greek, so that the linguistic flaws could be blamed on the translator.” (Smolak, p. 228 [PDF 243])
• “literature in the second degree does not effect cultural forgetting by way of replacement but rather gives them a new function, a new lease of life.” (Lange, p. 40 [PDF 55])

Physiologus: A Medieval Book of Nature Lore

• “The monoceras, that is, the unicorn, has this nature: he is a small animal like the kid, is exceedingly shrewd, and has one horn in the middle of his head.” (ch. XXXVI, p. 51)
• “The unicorn has one horn because the Savior said, “I and the Father are one” [John 10: 30].” (ch. XXXVI, p. 51)
• “We never stop to ask that animal stories be zoologically accurate, for that would be missing their point.” (Curley, Introduction, p. ix)
• “Physiologus was never intended to be a treatise on natural history. For that purpose, the Middle Ages had Pliny.” (Introduction, p. xv)
• “The elephant has no knee joints enabling him to sleep lying down if he wanted to.” (ch. XX, p. 30)
• “The legend of the unicorn arises out of reports concerning the rhinoceros.” (Curley, notes to ch. XXXVI, p. 86)

The Alienist

• ““Science,” he told His Majesty, “is my only office; Itaguai, my universe.”” (ch. I) | “The building had a courtyard in the center and two hundred cubicles, each with one window.” (ch. I) | “At the end of four months the Green House was a little community in itself. A gallery with thirty-seven more cubicles had to be added.” (ch. II) | “Till now, madness has been thought a small island in an ocean of sanity. I am beginning to suspect that it is not an island at all but a continent.” (ch. IV) | “In one gallery lived only those whose outstanding moral quality was modesty.” (ch. XII) | “He entered the Green House, shut the door behind him, and set about the business of curing himself.” (ch. XIII)

Mourning Diary

• “He wrote in ink, sometimes in pencil, on slips of paper (regular typing-paper cut into quarters) of which he kept a constant supply on his desk.” (Léger, Foreword)
• “Who knows? Maybe something valuable in these notes?” (Oct 27, 1977)
• “In taking these notes, I’m trusting myself to the banality that is in me.” (Oct 29, 1977)
• “What affects me most powerfully: mourning in layers—a kind of sclerosis. / [Which means: no depth. Layers of surface—or rather, each layer: a totality. Units]” (Nov 1, 1977)
• “What I find utterly terrifying is mourning’s discontinuous character.” (Nov 26, 1977)
• “These journal notes grow rarer. Silting up. So forgetting is inexorable?” (Nov 4, 1978)
• “Each time I dream about her (and I dream only of her), it is in order to see her, believe her to be alive, but other, separate.” (Mar 18, 1979)

The Sacred Conspiracy: The Internal Papers of the Secret Society of Acéphale and Lectures to the College of Sociology

• “Too long has human life served as head and reason for the universe.” (The Sacred Conspiracy, 1936, p. 125)
• “Man has escaped his head like a condemned man escaping from prison.” (p. 125)
• “Beyond what I am, I encounter a being who makes me laugh because he has no head, and who fills me with anguish because he is formed of innocence and crime” (p. 125)
• “What we are starting is a war.” (p. 124)
• “Never utter a single word — not even the slightest allusion — regarding these encounters” (Prohibitions Regarding the Forest of Acéphale, rule 3, p. 175)
• “A similar project to leave the supposed skull of Louis XVI at the same spot was likewise never carried out.” (Chronology, 1936, p. 113)
• “Bataille suggested an annual celebration of the guillotining of Louis XVI at the Place de la Concorde. This was never put into practice” (Introduction, p. 83)

Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics: Collected Papers on Quantum Philosophy

• “I want to boil an egg. … Yet the coincidence of these two unrelated causal happenings is meaningful, because, I, the great chef, imposed a structure on my kitchen.” (paper 24, ‘La nouvelle cuisine’, §1, quoting Casimir)
• “But apparently separate parts of the world become deeply entangled, and our apparent free will is entangled with them.” (paper 13)
• “In such ‘superdeterministic’ theories the apparent free will of experimenters, and any other apparent randomness, would be illusory.” (paper 24, §10)
• “In this matter of causality it is a great inconvenience that the real world is given to us once only.” (paper 12)
• “the hands of the clock will have moved, and the moons of Jupiter.” (paper 12)
• “How does the second sock know what the first has done?” (paper 16)
• “Disgrace indeed, to be caught in a metaphysical position!” (paper 12)

On Hashish

• “the second of these secrets cannot be recovered, since at this point the compiler of the protocol was very energetically prohibited from taking notes.” (Fränkel protocol, Apr. 18, 1931, p. 77)
• “I lay on my bed, read, and smoked.” (‘Myslovice—Braunschweig—Marseilles’, p. 110)
• “LYING DOWN, with eyes closed most of the time, completely calm.” (Wissing protocol, Mar. 7, 1931, p. 65)
• “But the true, creative overcoming of religious illumination certainly does not lie in narcotics. It resides in a profane illumination, a materialistic, anthropological inspiration” (‘Surrealism’, p. 132)
• “Just as waiting seems to be the proper state of the impassive thinker, doubt appears to be that of the flaneur.” (Arcades M2,4, p. 139)
• “The reader, the thinker, the person who waits, the flaneur, are types of illuminati—just as much as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic. And more profane.” (p. 134)

The Book to Come

• “The Sirens: it seems they did indeed sing, but in an unfulfilling way, one that only gave a sign of where the real sources and real happiness of song opened.” (p. 3)
• “it was also a means of navigation” (p. 4)
• “His is a fortunate and secure cowardliness, based on privilege, which places him outside of the common condition” (p. 4)
• “After the Sirens had been conquered by the power of the technique that always tries to play safely with unreal (inspired) powers” (p. 5)
• “We cannot deny that Ulysses heard a little of what Ahab saw, but he held firm in the midst of hearing” (p. 8)
• “The presence of a song only still to come.” (p. 9)
• “Mallarmé calls the reader ‘the operator.’” (p. 242)

The Collected Short Stories of Roberto Bolaño (‘The Insufferable Gaucho’)

• “Inevitably, he remembered Borges’s story ‘The South’, and when he thought of the store mentioned in the final paragraphs, tears brimmed in his eyes.” (≈26%)
• “There are no horses left here, he said, only rabbits.” (≈34%)
• “European nights might be pitch-dark or coal-black, but not American nights, which are dark like a void, where there’s nothing to hold on to, no shelter from the elements, just empty, storm-whipped space, above and below.” (≈39%)
• “For a moment he thought that his destiny, his screwed-up American destiny, would be to meet his death like Dahlman in ‘The South’, and it seemed wrong, partly because he now had debts to repay, and partly because he wasn’t ready to die,” (≈41%)
• “Argentina’s like a novel, he said, a lie, or make-believe at best.” (≈55%)
• “Ah, but the cemetery I’m talking about, said Pereda, is an exact copy of eternity.” (≈56%)
• “I believe we are losing our memory, he said. And just as well too.” (≈89%)
• “For a moment their gazes locked, as if, for each of them, the presence of the other were a gash in the ambient reality.” (≈96%)

Collected Fictions (‘The South’)

• “Something in the dimness brushed his forehead—a bat? a bird?” (≈12% through the story)
• “Reality is partial to symmetries and slight anachronisms;” (≈27%)
• “it was as though he were two men at once: the man gliding along through the autumn day and the geography of his native land, and the other man, imprisoned in a sanatorium and subjected to methodical attentions.” (≈48%)
• “his direct knowledge of the country was considerably inferior to his nostalgic, literary knowledge.” (≈52%)
• “There was something in its sorry architecture that reminded Dahlmann of a steel engraving, perhaps from an old edition of Paulet Virginie.” (≈65%)
• “It was as though the South itself had decided that Dahlmann should accept the challenge.” (≈92%)

Machines of the Mind: Personification in Medieval Literature

• “personification is as personification does” (Intro, p. 9)
• “Where novels often create an illusion of individuation through an accumulation of nonsignifying details, personifications are instead composed of exemplary or characteristic details.” (p. 2)
• “it may be more accurate to think about it as a design engine, or even a form of artificial intelligence” (p. 4)
• “nominalist personifications do not represent universals as much as they prompt readers to conceptualize them. They tend to be puzzles or enigmas, engaging readers through their incongruity rather than through visionary imagery or verisimilar detail.” (p. 24)
• “Daemonic personifications, in contrast, are much less authoritative and can even be faintly ridiculous.” (p. 23)
• “In later texts, it also illuminates the phenomenon of persons turning themselves into personifications.” (p. 25)
• Excerpt pp. 5–6 (Gregory’s machina)

Religio Medici and Urne-Buriall

• “I beleeve that our estranged and divided ashes shall unite againe; that our separated dust after so many pilgrimages and transformations into the parts of mineralls, Plants, Animals, Elements, shall at the voyce of God returne into their primitive shapes, and joyne againe to make up their primary and predestinated formes.” (RM I.48) | “I have heard some with deepe sighs lament the lost lines of Cicero; others with as many groanes deplore the combustion of the Library of Alexandria; for my owne part, I thinke there be too many in the world, and could with patience behold the urne and ashes of the Vatican” (RM I.24) | “But who knows the fate of his bones, or how often he is to be buried? who hath the Oracle of his ashes, or whither they are to be scattered?” (UB, Epistle Dedicatory) | “He that hath the ashes of his friend, hath an everlasting treasure” (UB III) | “But the iniquity of oblivion blindely scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity.” (UB V) | “The Ægyptian Mummies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummie is become Merchandise, Miszraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsoms.” (UB V) | “Though the earth had confounded the ashes of these Ossuaries, yet the bones were so smartly burnt, that some thin plates of brasse were found half melted among them” (UB III)

The Anatomy of Melancholy

• “I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy.” (Democritus Junior to the Reader)
• “Omne meum, nihil meum, ’tis all mine, and none mine.” (ibid.)
• “we can say nothing but what hath been said, the composition and method is ours only, & shows a Scholar.” (ibid.)
• “we shall have a vast Chaos and confusion of Books, we are oppressed with them, our eyes ache with reading, our fingers with turning.” (ibid.)
• “Many men (saith he) come to this malady by continual Study, and night-waking, and of all other men, Scholars are most subject to it” (1.2.3.15)
• “I no sooner (saith he) come into the Library, but I bolt the door to me … in the very lap of eternity, amongst so many divine souls, I take my seat” (2.2.4.1, Heinsius)

Transcript

• “Every part of transcript is a quotation; anything that might seem invented or fantastic is a verifiable document. Slight changes and omissions (which allow the unaltered contents to stand out in sharper relief) are not explicitly indicated.” (notes headnote, p. 131)
• “…sometimes to the point of a methodical gibberish that replicates a deadly gibberish.” (p. 131)
• “Himmler’s language reflects the progressive logic of the system: in 1942 being emigrated meant to be destroyed.” (note 16, p. 132)
• “Documents are literature that writes itself and is recognized as literature.” (Bäcker in Achleitner’s afterword, p. 148)
• “the card file on the dead was larger by far than the one on the living.” (p. 127)

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

• “I would like to be able to write a book that is only an incipit, that maintains for its whole duration the potentiality of the beginning, the expectation still not focused on an object.” (ch. 8)
• “it is the promise of a time of reading that extends before us and can comprise all possible developments.” (ch. 8)
• “Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book.” (ch. 7)
• “For an instant I seem to understand the meaning and fascination of a now inconceivable vocation: that of the copyist.” (ch. 8)
• “if you need little to set the imagination going, I require even less: the promise of reading is enough.” (ch. 11)
• “Just a moment, I’ve almost finished If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino.” (ch. 12)

Down Below

• “Exactly three years ago, I was interned in Dr. Morales’s sanatorium in Santander, Spain, Dr. Pardo, of Madrid, and the British Consul having pronounced me incurably insane.” (23 Aug 1943) | “(By looking at the map, you will see the respective positions of Villa Pilar, Radiografia, Covadonga, Amachu, and Abajo (Down Below); that will enable you to get your bearings.)” (24 Aug 1943) | “The pavilion with this name was for me the Earth, the Real World, Paradise, Eden, Jerusalem.” (26 Aug 1943) | “I realized that I had to find my place in the circle, and sat at 45 degrees to the left of the door” (27 Aug 1943) | “that Covadonga and Amachu and Down Below were not Egypt, China, and Jerusalem, but pavilions for the insane and that I should get out as quickly as possible.” (27 Aug 1943) | Excerpt: “Is Down Below nice?” “Delightful. Everyone is happy there.” “Take me with you.” “I can’t.” “Why not?” “Because you’re not well enough to go there.” (25 Aug 1943)

Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (extract: ‘sky’ sections)

• “how these actions are performed inwardly, no Microscope is able to give us a true information thereof.” (Of the Celestial Parts, p. 6)
• “put the case, the Moon, or any other of the Planets, were inhabited by animal Creatures, which could see as much of this terrestrial Globe, as we see of the Moon” (p. 5)
• “Man is apt to run into extreams, and spoils Nature with doting too much upon Art.” (Of flying, p. 4)
• “whether it be onely a delusion of the glasses, I will not dispute” (Of Telescopes, p. 8)
• “I chose rather to follow the guidance of regular Reason, then of deluding Art.” (Of Telescopes, p. 8)
• Excerpt: ‘Of Telescopes’, opening, p. 8

Some Ways of Making Nothing: Apophatic Apparatuses in Contemporary Art

• “There is, however, an important difference between abstaining from making something and purposefully making nothing.” (p. 130)
• “You cannot approach nothing; for there is nothing to approach.” (Whitehead, quoted p. 130)
• “A successful apophatic art apparatus is a work of art that resists (however fleetingly) the inevitable move toward becoming.” (p. 143)
• “Neither kataphasis nor apophasis ever get the last word.” (p. 143)
• “To equate blackness with nothing is to suffer from oculo-centrism” (p. 225)
• “Some nothings leave you pointing west, some leave you pointing east, and some leave you spinning your wheels in a ditch.” (p. 421)

The Journals of Captain Cook

• ‘as soon as we landed Touahah took me by the hand and conducted me to a large Morai, the other gentlemen with Parea and four or five more of the Natives followed.’ (Third Voyage, 17 Jan 1779, last entry)
• ‘hundreds were swiming about the Ships like shoals of fish.’ (17 Jan 1779)
• ‘Not a man had with him a Weapon of any sort, Trade and curiosity alone brought them off.’ (16 Jan 1779)
• ‘being desireous of being an eye wittness to a fact which many people had their doubts about, I concealed my indignation and ordered a piece of the flesh to be broiled’ (Second Voyage, Tuesday 23 [Nov] 1773)
• ‘I have often been asked, after relateing all the circumstance, if I had actualy seen them eat human flesh my self’ (23 [Nov] 1773)
• ‘Whatever else Cook wrote has not survived. His log breaks off at a moment of considerable importance’ (Edwards, Postscript)
• ‘He brought them iron, and they used it to kill him.’ (Edwards, Postscript)

A Childhood: The Biography of a Place

• “The Sears, Roebuck catalogue was much better used as a Wish Book, which it was called by the people out in the country, who would never be able to order anything out of it, but could at their leisure spend hours dreaming over.” (ch. Four)
• “I first became fascinated with the Sears catalogue because all the people in its pages were perfect.” (ch. Four)
• “forcing the beautiful people to give up the secrets of their lives: how they felt about one another, what kind of sicknesses they may have had, what kind of scars they carried in their flesh under all those bright and fancy clothes.” (ch. Four)
• “Making up stories, it seems to me now, was not only a way for us to understand the way we lived but also a defense against it.” (ch. Four)
• “Nothing is allowed to die in a society of storytelling people.” (ch. One)
• “I did not like to look at them caught in the stiff, protected pages.” (ch. One)
• “Some natural mimic in me picks up whatever verbal tics or mannerisms it gets close to.” (ch. One)

The Chapter: A Segmented History From Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century

• “This is a book about ruptures. But traversable ones: gaps one crosses, fissures within continuities, the marks within an individual life.” (Ante Chapter, p. 3)
• “Where that unit is not already marked or summarized, it can be summoned into being by the reader’s own gestures.” (ch. 2, p. 63)
• “the kephalaia are not unities but instead incitations” (ch. 3, p. 92)
• “For Locke, chapters are the artifacts of communal approaches: citation, proscribed ritual segmentation, numbing serial interruptions.” (ch. 5, p. 149)
• “The break occurs midgesture” (ch. 5, p. 161)
• “The chapter is a pause on a step or landing, a continuing motion or gesture caught midway, the awkwardness of stopping somewhere one is meant to keep traversing.” (ch. 5, p. 163)
• “Our comprehension of time is continually and inescapably punctuated and divided, not only in retrospect but in the very moments of its formation.” (Post Chapter, p. 290)

Mornings Like This

• “By entering a found text as a poem, the poet doubles its context. The original meaning remains intact, but now it swings between two poles.” (Author’s Note)
• “In the course of composing such found poems, the original authors’ intentions were usually first to go.” (Author’s Note)
• “Sometimes I dropped extra words; I never added a word.” (Author’s Note)
• “This is editing at its extreme: writing without composing.” (Author’s Note)
• “Stop carrying out your intentions.” (Signals at Sea, poem 16)

No Medium

• “the difference between the sophistication of getting the joke and the greater sophistication of refusing to get the joke depends on how closely one reads a work that seems to ask only that it not be read.” (ch. 1)
• “Media—if there are such things—are only recognizable as collectives.” (ch. 1)
• “to resist falling back on the sensational metaphysics of either a reified nothingness or the poststructural apotheosis of absence and lack” (ch. 1)
• “there are no real absences, only replacements” (ch. 2, Cenography)
• “Those blank pages linked with the cosmos: space before creation.” (Little Review reader, quoted ch. 1)
• “The other five tracks are inconsequential, and the title track performance of 4’33” reveals the conductor doesn’t take the tempi as marked; it clocks in a full 18 seconds too slow” (ch. 8, Further Listening)

Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition

• “It seems to have been conceived to foil all classification, be it scientific or popular.” (p. 58)
• “He has modified the intension and left the extension unchanged.” (p. 58)
• “Polo had no “Platonic” intuition of the unknown animal, nor did he try to construct its image and notion ex novo, but cobbled together previous notions, thus creating a new entity starting from some ideas about entities already known.” (p. 59)
• “deciding that the world also contained ill-favored black unicorns?” (p. 60)
• “Taxonomies, he said, are not just ways of ordering, they are guides to action.” (p. 246)
• “that double-damned beast that, as Lesson observed in 1839, had set itself athwart the path of taxonomy to prove its fallaciousness.” (p. 250)

Praise of Folly

• “It’s in praise of myself, namely, Folly.” (p. 11)
• “Who could portray me better than I can myself? Unless, of course, someone knows me better than I know myself.” (p. 11)
• “they still boast that they can see ideas, universals, separate forms, prime matters” (p. 85)
• “so that you’d extricate yourself faster from a labyrinth than from the tortuous obscurities of realists, nominalists, Thomists, Albertists, Ockhamists and Scotists” (p. 88)
• “But I’ve long been forgetting who I am, and I’ve ‘overshot the mark’.” (p. 134)
• “When I wanted to play the fool, I assumed the character of Folly, and just as in Plato Socrates masks his face in order to sing the praises of love, I too have played my comedy in character.” (Letter to Dorp, p. 143)
• Excerpt pp. 12–13 (refusal of definition)

The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain

• ‘Hypergraphia is neither painful nor common. Writer’s block is both.’ (Introduction)
• ‘all blocked writers share two traits: they do not write despite being intellectually capable of doing so, and they suffer because they are not writing.’ (ch. 3)
• ‘Writers can even be hypergraphic and blocked at the same time’ (ch. 3)
• ‘Melville’s hypergraphia is only a fragment of his literary inspiration, reflecting his drive but not his talent.’ (ch. 2)
• ‘Could we get the long-awaited sequel to The Catcher in the Rye if J. D. Salinger were on Paxil?’ (ch. 4)
• ‘I write in order to shut my eyes.’ (ch. 6, attributed to Kafka)

Bouvard and Pécuchet

• “The pleasure they feel in the physical act of copying.” (ch. 11, Their Copy, plan)
• “No time for reflection! Let’s copy! The page must be filled, the “monument” completed.” (ch. 12, plan)
• “End with a view of our two heroes leaning over their desk, copying.” (ch. 12, plan)
• “At the national library, they wanted to know the exact number of volumes.” (ch. 1)
• “MELANCHOLY: Sign of a distinguished heart and an elevated mind.” (Dictionary of Accepted Ideas)
• “DICTIONARY: Scoff at it—is only for ignoramuses.” (Dictionary)
• “BOOK: No matter which one, always too long.” (Dictionary)

Vampyres: Genesis and Resurrection, from Count Dracula to Vampirella

• ‘Swear by all your soul reveres, by all your nature fears, swear that for a year and a day you will not impart your knowledge of my crimes or death to any living being in any way, whatever may happen, or whatever you may see.’ (Polidori, The Vampyre; Part Two §2)
• ‘Remember your oath, and know, if not my bride today, your sister is dishonoured. Women are frail!’ (Polidori; Part Two §2)
• ‘Swear it, by all that – ’ He here dictated an oath of great solemnity. (Byron, ‘Fragment of a Story’; Part Two §2)
• ‘I swear to be faithful to you and never to forget you. If I should break my oath, come to me after your death and drink all my heart’s blood!’ (A. K. Tolstoy, ‘The Family of the Vourdalak’; Part Two §4)
• One of my companions whispered to another the line from Burger’s ‘Lenore’: – Denn die Todten reiten schnell – (For the dead travel fast.) (Stoker, Dracula ch. 1; Part Two §6)
• The quotation ‘the dead travel fast’ (from Bürger’s poem Lenore ) was at some stage removed from the Munich section of the novel (Frayling, headnote to §6)

Translations

• “Owen – Roland – what the hell. It’s only a name. It’s the same me, isn’t it? Well, isn’t it?” (Act One)
• “I may learn the password but the language of the tribe will always elude me, won’t it? The private core will always be … hermetic, won’t it?” (Yolland, Act Two, Scene One)
• “But remember that words are signals, counters. They are not immortal. And it can happen – to use an image you’ll understand – it can happen that a civilisation can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of … fact.” (Hugh, Act Two, Scene One)
• “it is not the literal past, the ‘facts’ of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.” (Hugh, Act Three)
• “I will provide you with the available words and the available grammar. But will that help you to interpret between privacies?” (Hugh, Act Three)

Ethics

• “It is the same as if two clocks agree precisely with each other and with the daily course of the Sun: when one chimes and tells the hours, the other also chimes and likewise indicates the hour; and all that without any causality in the sense of one having a causal effect on the other, but rather on account of mere dependence, inasmuch as both of them have been constructed with the same art and similar industry.” (Ann. to Tr. I, ch. II, sect. II, §2, Ann. 19, p. 232)
• “I do not know how such a thing is brought about, and it would be impudent of me to say that I do what I do not know how to do.” (Tr. I, ch. II, sect. II, §2 [4], p. 33)
• “Thus, I am a mere spectator of a machine whose workings I can neither adjust nor readjust.” (ibid. [8], p. 34)
• “It is just like a baby laid in his cradle: if he wishes the cradle to rock it sometimes rocks, though not because he wishes it, but because his mother or nurse, sitting beside it, wills it” (Ann. 19, p. 232)
• “the clock of my will and the clock of the world” (Ann. 48, p. 242)
• “wherein you have no power, therein you should not will” (Ann. 3 to Tr. I, ch. I, §2, p. 178)

The Essential Gombrich (‘Truth and the Stereotype’)

• “is a skill so deeply hidden in the human soul that we shall hardly guess the secret trick that Nature here employs” (Kant epigraph, p. 88)
• “Copying, we learn from these experiments, proceeds through the rhythms of schema and correction.” (p. 97)
• “Both proceed by classifying the unfamiliar with the familiar, or more exactly, to remain in the zoological sphere, by creating a subspecies.” (p. 101)
• “The familiar will always remain the likely starting point for the rendering of the unfamiliar; an existing representation will always exert its spell over the artist even while he strives to record the truth.” (p. 103)
• “you cannot create a faithful image out of nothing. You must have learned the trick if only from other pictures you have seen.” (p. 104)
• “It reminds us that the starting point of a visual record is not knowledge but a guess conditioned by habit and tradition.” (p. 107)

Russian Cosmism

• “The museum, by contrast, is a machine for making things last, making them immortal.” (Groys, Introduction) | “And the state must become the museum of its population.” (Groys, Introduction) | “Art, if it is the work of a rational being, must consist precisely in the resurrection of everything destroyed by blind force” (Fedorov, ‘Astronomy and Architecture’) | “For the arts (sculpture, painting) offer but to replace those bodies destroyed, with stone, with metal, with figurations not easily effaced” (Fedorov, ‘Astronomy and Architecture’) | “Being a cemetery, the Earth holds within it as many generations as there are worlds in the universe not ruled by reason” (Fedorov, ‘Astronomy and Architecture’) | “with resurrection being relegated to third place” (Svyatogor, ‘The Doctrine of the Fathers and Anarchism-Biocosmism’) | ““To burn at the stake! At the very least, it will be beautiful.”” (Bogdanov, ‘Immortality Day’, §6) | “Tongues of fire twisted around his body, hissing: “Everything repeats itself!”” (Bogdanov, ‘Immortality Day’, §6)

Structural Models in Anthropology

• “But classification according to structure is generally more important. And it is the same with ideas.” (epigraph, Peirce)
• “In theory the whole should be done in a single continuous line which ends where it began; the finger should never be lifted from the ground, nor should any part of the line be traversed twice” (p. 10, quoting Deacon 1934)
• “whatever the particular configurations may look like or represent, they are eulerian; that is, they are connected and all points have even degree.” (p. 12)
• “Euler replaced each land area by a point and each bridge by a line joining the corresponding points, thereby producing the first published graph theoretic model.” (p. 12)
• “graph theory is such a congenial mode of anthropological thought that if Euler had not discovered it, some anthropologist might very well have.” (p. 13)
• “A cutpoint of a connected graph is one whose removal (together with its incident lines) disconnects it” (p. 19)
• “If a graph G has a spanning cycle Z, then G is called a hamiltonian graph and Z is a hamiltonian cycle.” (p. 26)
• “the individuals and relations represented by cutpoints and bridges would presumably be of fundamental importance in the group.” (p. 29)

‘Insubordinate Irish’: Travellers in the Text

• “most scholars who have examined Shelta are now of the opinion that Shelta was formed in the modern period, possibly at that juncture when the language shift from Irish to English was taking place” (p. 18)
• “I would scarcely have taken much interest in Shelta, if it were nothing but tinkers’ cant, fabricated from Irish in modern times, of a kind not superior to the backslang of costers and cabmen.” (Meyer, quoted p. 21)
• “moral and social code, like his language, is certainly of the backslang order” (Sampson, quoted p. 21)
• “the most curious linguistic discovery of the century, the fifth British Celtic tongue!” (Leland, quoted p. 17)
• “the subaltern or ‘Other’ is represented and ‘translated’ through the essentialist language of the dominant culture” (p. 56)
• “They break into this when unwilling to be heard at their business.” (IFC respondent, p. 89)

Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics

• “This brand of philosophy, widely known as ‘occasionalism’, was as acceptable in the seventeenth century as it is ridiculed today.” (ch. 2, p. 35)
• “Latour is probably the first thinker in history to invent a local option for occasional cause—one not passing through God (as in al-Ash’ari, Malebranche, and even Whitehead) or the human mind (as when Hume and Kant turn human habit or categories into the seat of all relations).” (ch. 4, p. 81)
• “More occasionalist than Bergsonian, Latour’s actors have no choice but to occupy punctiform cinematic frames.” (ch. 5, p. 105)
• “they allow a single pampered entity to break the ban on relations that is cruelly enforced on all others.” (ch. 5, p. 113)
• “Bruno Latour is the first secular occasionalist” (ch. 5, p. 115)
• “Custom is to Hume what God is to the occasionalists: the only genuine link between separate realities” (ch. 5, p. 115)

Agnes Martin: Night Sea

• “scored and sometimes gilded, they generate pattern in and as surface.” (p. 13) | “the six-foot span – Martin’s standard canvas size as of 1960 – measures the reach of her own arms.” (p. 16) | “Near the top right corner, the main lines veer off track to the right, and the horizontal bands dip ever so slightly. The slopes show how her implementation of markings was keyed to her movement.” (p. 16) | “Accident betrays her.” (p. 17) | “these marks positively evidence what Annette Michelson once characterised as a distinctively human ‘visual tremolo’, which is to say, that they are aleatory and minutely flawed.” (p. 17) | “she could not conceal the journey of her hand across the page, or the systems she put in place to attempt regulation.” (p. 18) | “in addition to a T-square and ruler, Martin used threads to track vertical and horizontal coordinates, a trick assimilated from watching Tawney dress her loom” (Sachs, quoted p. 36) | “Well, when I first made a grid I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees” (Martin, quoted p. 45)

Lines: A Brief History

• “Fully linearized, the line is no longer the trace of a gesture but a chain of point-to-point connections. In these connections there is neither life nor movement. Linearization, in short, marks not the birth but the death of the line.” (ch. 5, p. 151) | “For Semper the prototypical line was a thread; for Riegl it was a trace” (ch. 2, p. 42) | “more like a series of appointments than a walk” (Klee, quoted ch. 3, p. 73) | “the straight lines of the ruled manuscript, which guided the writer’s hand in weaving the letter-line, can be traced back to the parallel warp-threads of the loom. The threads were straight because they were taut.” (ch. 6, p. 157) | “A ruler is a sovereign who controls and governs a territory. It is also an instrument for drawing straight lines.” (p. 160) | “Only when the architect ceased to be a master-builder and retreated to the drawingboard were templates replaced by the ruler, and taut threads by the ruled traces of the diagram.” (p. 161) | “so no line that is ever drawn – even with a ruler – can ever be perfectly straight. An element of risk is always involved.” (p. 162)

The Book of Beginnings

• “We never exit a first sentence.” (ch. 4)
• “At the same time as it arises, it folds the thinkable; that inaugural act, because of its scope, already amounts to completion.” (ch. 4)
• “Such an opening sentence, as we can see, does not construct; it is content with simultaneously unbinding and binding.” (ch. 5)
• “that the infinitesimal can become infinite.” (ch. 7)
• “it is uttered without author and without witness.” (ch. 8)
• “No negative means no ‘story.’ This first Chinese sentence, as we can see, opens no account” (ch. 8)
• “Isn’t it when the book is finished that you write the introduction?” (Preface)
• Excerpt: ch. 4, ‘The First Sentence’ (curtain raiser passage)
• Other: glossary of opening words (yuan, heng, li, zhen, bara’, archometha, genato)

The Ghost Rider

• “So who did Bürger steal it from?” the young woman asks. (Introduction, David Bellos)
• ‘Now I am left alone in the world, for you have broken your promise. May the earth never receive you!’ (ch. 2)
• A curse be on thee, Kostandin! Do you recall the solemn promise you made? Or has your besa rotted with you in the grave? (ch. 3)
• It was still very rare: delicate, like a wild flower needing tender care, its shape as yet undefined. (ch. 6)
• Except for one thing, Captain Stres: there was no default. He kept his promise in the end. (ch. 6)
• Therefore, to be more exact I would have to say that it was all of us – you, me, our dead lying there in the graveyard close by the church – who, through Kostandin, brought Doruntine back. (ch. 7)

The Traitor’s Niche

• “Abdulla thought that the absence of a body made the eyes larger and more significant than they really were.” (ch. 1, ≈2%)
• “It was previously thought that states had so many memorials and monuments in order that nothing should be forgotten. But it was discovered later that a major state had as much need to forget as to remember, if not more.” (ch. 2, ≈11%)
• “In his mind, if dimly, the idea had been born that a severed head could fascinate an audience just as much as a work of art.” (ch. 3, ≈25%)
• “Tundj Hata knew that for remote, buried hamlets, this spectacle was at the same time their literature, theater, art, philosophy, and perhaps love.” (ch. 3, ≈31%)
• “The blanket of night was not large enough to cover the whole body of the state. Either its head or its feet would be left outside.” (ch. 3, ≈32%)
• “It took a long time to convince them that a pasha might be without a head.” (ch. 7, ≈90%)

Diaries, 1910-1923

• ‘7 June. Bad. Wrote nothing today. Tomorrow no time.’ (7 June 1912)
• ‘This story, ‘The Judgement’, I wrote at one sitting during the night of the 22nd–23rd, from ten o’clock at night to six o’clock in the morning. … as if I were advancing over water.’ (23 Sept 1912)
• ‘Everything that is not literature bores me and I hate it, for it disturbs me or delays me, if only because I think it does.’ (21 Aug 1913)
• ‘Yesterday incapable of writing even one word. Today no better. Who will save me?’ (8 April 1914)
• ‘The strange, mysterious, perhaps dangerous, perhaps saving comfort that there is in writing: it is a leap out of murderers’ row; it is a seeing of what is really taking place.’ (27 Jan 1922)
• ‘I SHOULD write the whole night through, so many things occur to me, but all of it rough.’ (Travel diary, Jan–Feb 1911)

Travels With Herodotus

• “In the world of Herodotus, the only real repository of memory is the individual.” (ch. 7, Memory Along the Roadways of the World)
• “And after finally encountering him, one must sit down and listen to what he has to say—to listen, remember, perhaps write it down. That is how reportage begins; of such circumstances it is born.” (ch. 7)
• “Later, these will be called legends and myths, but in the instant when they are first being related and heard, the tellers and the listeners believe in them as the holiest of truths, absolute reality.” (ch. 7)
• “not only listening to what they say, but also watching how they say it, how they act as they speak.” (ch. 18, The Greek’s Technique)
• “If this is true, I don’t know. I write only that which is said …” (ch. 18)
• “Here, a present, for the road.” (ch. 1, Crossing the Border)

Essays in Idleness

• “To while away the idle hours, seated the livelong day before the ink-slab, by jotting down without order or purpose whatever trifling thoughts pass through my mind, verily this is a queer and crazy thing to do!” (preface)
• “Truly the beauty of life is its uncertainty.” (§7)
• “In all things one looks back with regret to the past. Modern fashions appear to be growing from bad to worse.” (§22)
• “What one wants are things with an air of age, not showy and expensive, but of good quality.” (§81)
• “To leave a thing unfinished gives interest, and makes for lengthened life. They say that even in building the palace an unfinished place is always left.” (§82)
• “Are we only to look at flowers in full bloom, at the moon when clear?” (§137)

In the Dark Places of Wisdom

• “What’s important is that you would do absolutely nothing. The point came when you wouldn’t struggle or make an effort. You’d just have to surrender to your condition.” (p. 80)
• “It’s all tied up with that clumsy word: incubation.” (p. 101)
• “Usually you’d lie down in a special place where you wouldn’t be disturbed.” (p. 101)
• “It used to mean giving a voice to what doesn’t have a voice, meant acting as a mouthpiece for the divine.” (p. 108)
• “Really it was already the end itself, the ultimate paradox of the end that’s present at the beginning.” (p. 186)

Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist (‘On the Theater of Marionettes’)

• “Each movement, he said, had a center of gravity; it would suffice to control this point from the center of the figure; the limbs, which are, after all, nothing but pendulums, would follow mechanically on their own without anything else needing to be done.” (On the Theater of Marionettes)
• “have you heard of those mechanical limbs that English artists had fashioned for those poor unfortunates who’d lost their own?” (ibid.)
• “I did, indeed, know all too well what a mess consciousness had made of the natural grace of Man.” (ibid.)
• “He was simply unable to repeat the same movement” (ibid.)
• “An invisible and inconceivable force, like an iron net, seemed to settle over and impinge upon the free play of movements” (ibid.)
• “so too, does grace return once perception, as it were, has traversed the infinite – such that it simultaneously appears the purest in human bodily structures that are either devoid of consciousness or which possess an infinite consciousness, such as in the jointed manikin or the god.” (ibid.)
• “Undoubtedly,” he replied; “which will be the last chapter of the history of the world.” (ibid.)
• “they seem to suggest with embarrassed gestures that they themselves don’t rightly know what they wished to say.” (On the Gradual Formulation of Thoughts While Speaking)
• Excerpt: the youth at the mirror
• Other: a misreading worth attempting (C… as film director)

Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929

• “The force taking effect is the user’s hand. A book lacks this property of free motion, and owing to its rigid form it is not a paper machine.” (ch. 1, Introduction)
• “Finally, cut out everything you have copied with a pair of scissors; arrange the slips as you desire, first into larger clusters which can then be subdivided again as often as necessary.” (ch. 2, Temporary Indexing)
• “In isolation, every index card is in peril of becoming a data corpse; to live, it must enter into relations with the remaining content.” (ch. 4, In Praise of the Cross-Reference)
• “What surprises is not only the difference in understanding between this time and that time—ah, so that’s how I took this at that time—but also the potential path that was not developed the first time the author noticed it, but looks promising when accessed again.” (ch. 4)
• “Storing states of knowledge and (via their contacts with the interface) helping to catalyze future thoughts, index cards know more than their author.” (ch. 4, On the Gradual Manufacturing of Thoughts in Storage)
• “Three days after his death, one of his students begins a careful autopsy of his index cards.” (Notes, ch. 4, n. 5)

The Last Days of Mankind: The Complete Text

• “The most improbable conversations conducted here were spoken word for word; the most lurid fantasies are quotations.” (Preface)
• “The document takes human shape; reports come alive as characters and characters expire as editorials; the newspaper column has acquired a mouth that spouts monologues; platitudes stand on two legs—unlike men left with only one.” (Preface)
• “Universal conscription has turned mankind into a passive noun. Once men joined the forces, now they’re forced to join.” (II, 10)
• “Thanks for the compliment, but don’t you remember? My most lurid fantasies are quotations!” (V, 44)
• “Not by hunger but by enemy action—damn, what am I saying—not by enemy action but by hunger!” (II, 16) / “Not by force but by hunger—dammit, what am I saying! Not by hunger but by force!” (III, 22)

The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths

• “we could say that all the casts of The Gates of Hell are examples of multiple copies that exist in the absence of an original” (p. 152)
• “a legitimate work: a real original we might say” (p. 151)
• “Sitting in the little theater, watching the newest Gates being cast, watching this violation, we want to call out, ‘Fraud.’” (p. 157)
• “to find the mark, the warrant, the certification of the original” (p. 162)
• “the modernist grid is, like the Rodin casts, logically multiple: a system of reproductions without an original” (p. 162)
• “spontaneity was the most fakable of signifieds” (p. 167)
• “we look back on the modernist origin and watch it splintering into endless replication” (p. 170)

Arioflotga

• “I have only had glimpses of the life I would like to have had.” (epigraph)
• “A,b,c,d and so on. Where’s the problem?” (first line, under A)
• “At first, in the beginning, there was no such thing as Time.” (under A)
• “All poets fail. That is, perhaps, what poetry is.” (under A)
• “I can’t get these bloody openings out of my mind.” (under I)
• “Let me, I beg you, O Muse, begin this epic about poetry,” (under L)
• “No actual poem anywhere would begin like this” (under N)
• “Zzzzz. No, no. Don’t wake me up. In fact,” (last line, under Z)
• Excerpt: the compiler’s bracketed note (front matter)

A Perfect Vacuum

• “It was necessary, then—and herein is the consequence—to write nothing.” (p. 71)
• “Total freedom is total paralysis in literature.” (p. 72)
• “Instead of a print we obtain an exact negative, that is all. The nature of an innovation must be ontological, and not simply grammatical!” (p. 74)
• “Nonbeing is already known to us in literature, but only as a certain Lack—of Something—for Someone.” (p. 75)
• “How can a thing be in bad taste which is not there at all?!” (p. 76)
• “The novel does not end: it ceases.” (p. 79)
• “a critique of a book that not only does not exist but also cannot.” (p. 4)

Gesture and Speech

• “They take the form of tight curves or series of lines engraved in bone or stone, small equidistant incisions that provide evidence of figurative representation moving away from the concretely figurative and proof of the earliest rhythmic manifestations.” (p. 188) | “If there is one point of which we may be absolutely sure, it is that graphism did not begin with naive representations of reality but with abstraction.” (p. 188) | “Four thousand years of linear writing have accustomed us to separating art from writing” (p. 192) | ”… a cosmos whose center they occupy without trying to pierce it by an intellectual process which letters have strung out in a needle-sharp, but also needle-thin, line.” (p. 200) | “The gesture interprets the word, and the word comments upon graphic expression.” (p. 210) | “Written language, phoneticized and linear in space, becomes completely subordinated to spoken language, which is phonetic and linear in time.” (p. 210) | “The program of the Jacquard loom is external to the organs of execution” (p. 250)

Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk: Selected Stories of Nikolai Leskov (‘The Steel Flea’)

• “coming down to the hidebound flea, which you can’t see with your eyes but can only feel when he bites you between your hide and your body.” (§3)
• “he took the flea and put it on his tongue and said, “I feel something cold, like strong metal.”” (§4)
• “Because I did smaller work than these flea-shoes,” he said. “I made the nails the shoes were fastened on with, and they are too small for any nitroscope to blow them up.” (§14)
• “We are poor people—too poor to own a nitroscope, so we just sharpened our eyes.” (§14)
• “you didn’t realize that such a little machine as the one in the nymphusoria was calculated for the most accurate exactness, and it can’t carry the flea-shoes.” (§15)
• “machines have evened up the inequalities in gifts and talents, and genius no longer strains itself in a struggle against diligence and exactness.” (§19)
• Excerpt: §13, Lefty’s method (‘look one at a time at each foot it walks on’)

Works

• “A book describes works that the author has conceived but not brought into being.” (#1)
• “Despite a compulsive desire to make a drawing, a man settles for describing the project. The drawing is realized later, following his notes.” (#240)
• “Visualizing what they hear, the listeners perform the inverse operation to the man: translating words into images.” (#283)
• “Villard de Honnecourt, a medieval architect, is not known for his buildings as much as for his writings on those of his contemporaries.” (#316)
• “A voice describes an unrealized work as if it had been completed: a pile of pipettes in the Sahel desert.” (#325)
• “The reading ends when no one asks him to continue.” (#533)

And Their Children After Them

• “He was holding a copy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the first he had ever seen, it is said. He fumed that it made them look like slaves.” (Part III, ‘Gudger’, 1960–1986)
• “Everyone gits rich offn us. I ain’t talking.” (Part III, ‘Gudger’)
• “He was nearly blind, but kept looking at Evans’s pictures. He was so happy that he was a famous man, Margaret recalls.” (Part III, ‘Ricketts’)
• “Before her death, say her relatives, Maggie Louise saw the Agee and Evans book, the copy owned by her mother.” (Part III, ‘Gudger’)
• “My goodness, I could turn around and write a book on him.” (Part III, ‘Gudger’)
• “And now we were returning to the scene of the crime, so to speak, coconspirators in the eyes of some, not just to inquire of the deed but to repeat it.” (Preface)
• “Word slowly drifted back to Alabama that some of their own had made up the cast of characters in a famous book.” (Part III, ‘Gudger’)

Remainder

• “No Doing without Understanding: the accident bequeathed me that for ever, an eternal detour.” (ch. 2)
• “There are twenty-seven separate manoeuvres involved.” (ch. 2)
• “lifted more than a thousand imaginary carrots to your mouth, or one imaginary carrot more than a thousand times, which amounts to the same thing.” (ch. 2)
• “Every move he made, each gesture was perfect, seamless.” … “Perfect. Real. My movements are all fake. Second-hand.” (ch. 2)
• “My body seemed to glide fluently and effortlessly through the atmosphere around it—gracefully, slowly, like a dancer through water.” (ch. 8)
• “The liver lady had come up with that fantastic line but then dropped her rubbish bag when she’d tried to re-enact her movements for a third time.” (ch. 8)
• “I and the other re-enactors were like a set of devotees to a religion not yet founded: patient, waiting for our deity to appear, to manifest himself to us, redeem us; and our gestures were all votive ones, acts of anticipation.” (ch. 16)
• “Go?” I said. “Nowhere. Just keep doing this.” (ch. 16)
• Excerpt: ch. 2, the carrot

A Certain Plume

• “Extending his hands from his bed, Plume was astonished not to feel the wall: “Well, he concluded, the ants must have eaten it away…” And he went back to sleep.” (I, A Peaceable Man)
• “Of the two it is always the object who’s in charge.” (XIII, Buddha)
• “He who is firm is a man. But he who is soft is without limits. He takes on every form, he is born everywhere. Truth be told, he’s the Buddha.” (XIII, Buddha)
• “Misfortune, my great plowman.” (XXX, At Rest in Misfortune)
• “There is no single self. There are not ten selves. There is no self. SELF is but a point of equilibrium. … An averaged ‘self,’ a crowd movement. In the name of the many, I sign this book.” (Postface, 1938)
• “not imposing enough or universal enough to assume outright allegorical significance” (Sieburth, Afterword)

Up in the Old Hotel

• “Mr. Flood is not one man; combined in him are aspects of several old men who work or hang out in Fulton Fish Market, or who did in the past. I wanted these stories to be truthful rather than factual, but they are solidly based on facts.” (Author’s Note, Old Mr. Flood)
• “Some talk has an obvious meaning and nothing more, he said, and some, often unbeknownst to the talker, has at least one other meaning and sometimes several other meanings lurking around inside its obvious meaning.” (Joe Gould’s Secret)
• “‘The history of a nation is not in parliaments and battlefields, but in what the people say to each other on fair days and high days, and in how they farm, and quarrel, and go on pilgrimage.’” (Joe Gould’s Secret)
• “And the Oral History doesn’t exist.” (Joe Gould’s Secret)
• “But the truth is, I never actually wrote a word of it.” (Joe Gould’s Secret)

Network Theory, Plot Analysis (Literary Lab Pamphlet 2)

• “A network is made of vertices and edges; a plot, of characters and actions: characters will be the vertices of the network, interactions the edges” (p. 3)
• “two characters are linked if some words have passed between them: an interaction, is a speech act.” (p. 3)
• “Anyway. Four hours of action, that become this. Time turned into space” (p. 3)
• “what is truly deadly, is the characters’ position in the network, chained to the warring poles of king and prince. Outside of that red region, no one dies in Hamlet. The tragedy, is all there.” (p. 4)
• “Not for what is “in” it; not for its essence, but for its function in the stability of the network.” (p. 5)
• “Horatio has a function in the play, but not a motivation.” (p. 7)
• “The theory proper requires a level of mathematical intelligence which I unfortunately lack” (p. 2)

Sleeping with the Dictionary

• “Any exit from the logic of language might be an entry in a symptomatic dictionary.” (Sleeping with the Dictionary)
• “In the dark night’s insomnia, the book is a stimulating sedative, awakening my tired imagination to the hypnagogic trance of language.” (ibid.)
• “The alphabetical order of this ample block of knowledge might render a dense lexicon of lucid hallucinations.” (ibid.)
• “This dream is not a map. A poem is not the territory.” (Exploring the Dark Content)
• “They just can’t seem to … They should try harder to …” (Elliptical)
• “My honeybunch’s peepers are nothing like neon.” (Dim Lady)

The Sovereignty of Good

• “I have used the word ‘attention’, which I borrow from Simone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality.” (ch. 1, ‘The Idea of Perfection’)
• “I can only choose within the world I can see” (ch. 1)
• “Freedom is not strictly the exercise of the will, but rather the experience of accurate vision which, when this becomes appropriate, occasions action.” (ch. 2, ‘On God and Good’)
• “In the moral life the enemy is the fat relentless ego.” (ch. 2)
• “Prayer is properly not petition, but simply an attention to God which is a form of love.” (ch. 2)
• “There is nothing now but kestrel.” (ch. 3, ‘The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts’)

Insomniac Dreams: Experiments With Time by Vladimir Nabokov

• “One hundred and eighteen handwritten Oxford cards, now held in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, bear sixty-four such records, many with relevant daytime episodes.” (Part 1, Chronic Condition)
• “time’s progress is not unidirectional but recursive: the reason we do not notice the backflow is that we are not paying attention.” (Part 1)
• “Nabokov jotted down his dreams the way he did his novels—on small, lined Oxford cards whose growing stack he rubber-banded” (Part 1, Nabokov’s Experiment)
• “This is my first incontestable success in the Dunne experiment.” (card of Oct. 20, 1964, Part 2)
• “Very exact clock time awareness but hazy passing-of-time feeling.” (Part 2, Curious features)
• “This is nice! Had quite forgotten this when inventing Ardis. March 4, 1968” (Part 2, record 2)
• “Dreamt of Cyr. first time since his death in April.” (card of Dec. 29, 1964, Part 2)

The Coming

• “The non-occurrence of the catastrophe was a catastrophe which ultimately made the world impossible to live in.” (ch. 9) | “Truth always appears as a fiction and takes the form of a story. I am a storyteller.” (ch. 1) | “The third was now dug out of its tomb: the Messiah could come again.” (ch. 6) | “He died in Ulcinj on 30 September 1676. That was Yom Kippur.” (ch. 6) | “When a good sleuth and God are finished, no further interpretation is possible, there’s only applause” (ch. 8) | “The Apocalypse had been a kind of solution, after all.” (ch. 9) | “The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival” (Kafka, epigraph)

Cannibal Talk: The Man-Eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in the South Seas

• ‘I point out that this myth was not constructed in Hawai‘i but in London’ (ch. 1, p. 18)
• ‘They could easily change into their white coats, for let it not be forgotten they were representatives of the Royal Society.’ (ch. 2, p. 25)
• ‘when Pickersgill brought the head on board, the ship’s officers wanted to produce empirical proof of cannibalism among the Maori.’ (ch. 2, p. 31)
• ‘For Cook and his crew the admission of cannibalism naturally proved its existence because, then and now, admission, like eyewitnessing, is an indicator of truth.’ (p. 55)
• ‘Our anthropological knowledge of Maori anthropophagy thus eludes us from the very start.’ (p. 59)
• ‘in respect of cannibalism, an eyewitness account is particularly suspect since it taps fantasy, fascination, and latent desire’ (p. 111)
• ‘what I read adds to my confusion as surely as it adds to Sahlins’s clarity.’ (ch. 6, p. 168)

Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West

• “Its primary function is to resolve structural uncertainties in a text, and to signal nuances of semantic significance which might otherwise not be conveyed at all, or would at best be much more difficult for a reader to figure out.” (Introduction, p. 1)
• “such as a repertoire of intonations, or gestures and facial expressions” (Introduction, p. 2)
• “the readers’ marks record individual interpretations of the texts.” (ch. 1, p. 14)
• “the basic unit in a western text has been the paragraph or capitulum.” (ch. 7, p. 65)
• “although every Reader hath a Right to point an ancient Author as he pleases, since the Art of Punctuation, if it may be so called, is of modern Invention, yet great Exactness is required when it is for public use.” (ch. 7, p. 91, quoting an 18th-c. editor of Horace)
• “Laurence Sterne employs ‘elocutionary’ punctuation to enhance the intimacy between Yorick and the reader” (ch. 7, p. 92)
• “A symbol developed from the letter C (for capitulum q.v.) with a vertical stroke, which largely replaced the paragraphus (q.v.) to indicate the beginning of a paragraph, proposition, stanza or section” (Glossary, paraph, p. 305)

Life: A User’s Manual

• “the parts do not determine the pattern, but the pattern determines the parts” (Preamble)
• “The eye follows the paths that have been laid down for it in the work (Paul Klee, Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch )” (Preamble epigraph)
• “a vertical cross-section of the building giving a diagrammatic picture of the layout of the flats” (Ch. 1)
• “an arbitrarily constrained programme with no purpose outside its own completion” (Ch. 26)
• “the black hole of the sole piece not yet filled in has the almost perfect shape of an X. But the ironical thing, which could have been foreseen long ago, is that the piece the dead man holds between his fingers is shaped like a W.” (Ch. 99)
• “dividing it up into regular square boxes, the sketch of a cross-section of a block of flats which no figure, now, would ever come to inhabit.” (Epilogue)
• “in isolation, a puzzle piece means nothing – just an impossible question, an opaque challenge.” (Preamble)

Portrait of a Man

• “to create an authentic masterwork of the past” (Part I, ≈31%)
• “Anything by anybody of any period” (Part I, ≈66%)
• “Forger. Faussaire. Fausse ère : wrong period.” (Part I, ≈83%)
• “it was the double, triple, quadruple game of a fake artist pastiching his own pastiche” (Part I, ≈98%)
• “I’d take three or four works by whomever, pick out various bits and pieces from them all, juggle them around and make a jigsaw puzzle out of them. But that didn’t work for an Antonello.” (Part II, ≈13%)
• “‘And the certificate of authenticity?’ ‘They had them. I never knew where they got them, or whether they were fakes too or whether they had an official authenticator on their books.’” (Part II, ≈85%)
• “I did succeed in painting my own portrait … I got my own face” (Part II, ≈88%)
• “a painting cannot be a forgery and an authentic work of art at the same time” (Bellos, Introduction, ≈47%)

The Tacit Dimension

• “I shall reconsider human knowledge by starting from the fact that we can know more than we can tell.” (ch. 1, ‘Tacit Knowing’)
• “in an act of tacit knowing we attend from something for attending to something else” (ch. 1)
• “By concentrating attention on his fingers, a pianist can temporarily paralyze his movement.” (ch. 1)
• “Our body is the ultimate instrument of all our external knowledge, whether intellectual or practical.” (ch. 1)
• “Thought can live only on grounds which we adopt in the service of a reality to which we submit.” (Introduction)

They Say in Harlan County: An Oral History

• “There is no such thing as a neutral transcript: each comma is an act of interpretation” (PDF 19 / p. 10)
• “never putting into people’s mouths words they did not actually say (insertions are in brackets)” (PDF 19 / p. 10)
• “What people believe and what they forget is as significant as what people recall accurately.” (PDF 20 / p. 11)
• “the most important things I had to offer were my ignorance and my desire to learn.” (PDF 16 / p. 7)
• “Much of the meaning is in the gaps and in the silences, to be extracted or filled in by the readers’ cooperation and imagination.” (PDF 20 / p. 11)
• Annie Napier: “They say sometimes something favorite of somebody’s, their spirit will attach to it, but, now, I don’t know if that’s true or not.” (PDF 35 / p. 26)

Mallarmé: The Politics of the Siren

• “sirens do not exist, except in the writings of poets.” (p. 6)
• “the poet is unable to make himself heard to a crowd still to come” (p. 5)
• “it is the act, the suspension itself of fiction. It is the transformation of the narrative into a vanishing hypothesis.” (p. 7)
• “Industry made religious; religion made industrial – in order to establish the new hymn and theatre and replace the representative political machine.” (p. 28)
• “the conditions do not yet exist for the union of poet and crowd in ‘the hymn of spiritual hearts’.” (p. 33)
• “So it is pointless to try to cut short the ‘tunnel of the times’ and alight, today already, at some ‘central station’” (p. 34)
• “The orchestra conductor’s movement retains the mystery in its place and warns the crowd about adoring itself in the new temple.” (p. 38)

The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation

• “There is stultification whenever one intelligence is subordinated to another.” (p. 13) | “There is no one on earth who hasn’t learned something by himself and without a master explicator.” (p. 16) | “Whoever teaches without emancipating stultifies.” (p. 18) | “To teach what one doesn’t know is simply to ask questions about what one doesn’t know.” (p. 30) | “Universal teaching is the poor’s method. But it isn’t a method of the poor.” (p. 106) | “It’s the disciple that makes the master.” (p. 19) | Excerpt pp. 29–30 (Meno’s slave)

Technical Ekphrasis in Greek and Roman Science and Literature

• “ekphrastic descriptions carry the power of enargeia, the clarity of imaginary vision sparked in the reader” (p. 2)
• “The object may be real, theoretical, or imaginary; contemporary or historical; it may be familiar or something neither author nor reader has ever experienced.” (p. 14)
• “Because automata are designed to mystify an audience, Hero takes into account the perspective of the audience as well as the designer.” (p. 5)
• “once that part of the text is done, so is the machine.” (p. 199)
• “The alternative to this ‘lived-in’ space is a depopulated or impersonal construction space, in which the artifact seems to come together without human intervention.” (p. 205)
• “while there is indeed a Helping Hand in Greek mathematics, there seems not to be a Helping Imagination.” (p. 205, quoting Creese)

Impressions of Africa

• “Manufactured in situ by an anomaly of this extraordinary machine, which was specially designed to perform for an attentive audience” (ch. VI)
• “the machine could reproduce the same design indefinitely, without aid or supervision.” (ch. X)
• “Despite the absence of an actual lens, the polished surface, owing to its extreme sensitivity, received extremely powerful impressions of light” (ch. IX)
• “Louise watched joyfully over the operation of her machine, which so far had functioned without accident or error.” (ch. IX)
• “The work must contain nothing real, no observations on the world or the mind, nothing but completely imaginary combinations.” (Janet, quoted in Polizzotti’s Introduction)

The Lamp of Memory

• “For, indeed, the greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, nor in its gold. Its glory is in its Age” (¶11)
• “it is in that golden stain of time, that we are to look for the real light, and colour, and preciousness of architecture” (¶11)
• “Do not let us talk then of restoration. The thing is a Lie from beginning to end.” (¶12)
• “Watch an old building with an anxious care; guard it as best you may, and at any cost, from every influence of dilapidation.” (¶12)
• “They are not ours. They belong partly to those who built them, and partly to all the generations of mankind who are to follow us.” (¶13)
• “This closing paragraph of the sixth chapter is the best, I think, in the book, – and the vainest. [1880.]” (note)

Islands of History

• ‘But indeed they were so Exceedingly perplexed in their Accounts that it was a hard matter to Colect Certainty, in particular cases, or indeed to write any Account at all.’ (Home’s log, epigraph to ch. 4, p. 104)
• ‘They were singing!’ (p. 105)
• ‘Cook indeed became the image of Lono, a duplicate of the crosspiece icon’ (p. 105)
• ‘Permit me thus an anthropological reading of the historical texts.’ / ‘the one recurrent certainty is a dramatic structure with the properties of a ritual transformation.’ (p. 106)
• ‘a set of historical relationships that at once reproduce the traditional cultural categories and give them new values out of the pragmatic context’ (p. 125)
• ‘Captain Cook fell victim to the play of Hawaiian categories, or more precisely to their interplay with his own’ (Intro, p. xiii)
• ‘Every actual use of cultural ideas is some reproduction of them, but every such reference is also a difference.’ (ch. 5, p. 153)

Sabbatai Ṣevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626-1676

• “To believe in an apostate messiah was to build one’s hope on foundations of paradox and absurdity, which could only lead to more paradoxes.” (p. 690) | “The Sabbatian paradox, however, was not that of a saint who suffers and whose suffering is a mystery hidden with God, but of a saint who sins.” (p. 691) | “adopt the dress of the people through whose land he passes, and to behave as they do, lest they notice that he is a spy” (p. 802) | “Readers of Paul’s letters can learn a great deal from these later Jewish writings, composed in a very similar psychological situation.” (p. 803) | “And finally he [that is, the messiah] will restore [to holiness] his qelippah which is Jesus Christ.” (p. 285) | “Neither Our Lord nor anything else was in the cave, but it was full of light.” (p. 920) | “Return every man to his house. How long will you hold fast to me?” (p. 917) | “Enthusiasm and love know of no hopeless situations. They play with the impossible, and rather than despair, they violate reality.” (Renan, quoted p. 689)

The Quest of the Historical Jesus

• “The whole history of “ Christianity ” down to the present day, that is to say, the real inner history of it, is based on the delay of the Parousia, the non-occurrence of the Parousia” (ch. XIX) | “lays hold of the wheel of the world to set it moving on that last revolution which is to bring all ordinary history to a close” (ch. XIX) | “So they stole the body of Jesus and hid it, and proclaimed to all the world that He would soon return.” (ch. II) | “Accordingly, the main problem of primitive dogmatics was the delay of the Parousia.” (ch. II) | “There is no historical task which so reveals a man’s true self as the writing of a Life of Jesus.” (ch. I) | “He planned the work at Gaza” (ch. XIII, on Renan)

After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation

• “A civilization is imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches, or matches only at certain ritual, arbitrary points, the changing landscape of fact.” (Ch. 1)
• “Languages are wholly arbitrary sets of signals and conventionalized counters.” (Ch. 1)
• “Often, cultures seem to expend on their vocabulary and syntax acquisitive energies and ostentations entirely lacking in their material lives.” (Ch. 2)
• “Obviously, we speak to communicate. But also to conceal, to leave unspoken.” (Ch. 1)
• “In the beginning the word was largely a pass-word, granting admission to a nucleus of like speakers.” (Ch. 3)
• “Streaming outward it thins, losing energy and pressure as it reaches an alien speaker.” (Ch. 3)

Lessons of the Masters

• “Masters have destroyed their disciples both psychologically and, in rarer cases, physically.” (Intro) | “The Master learns from the disciple and is modified by this interrelation in what becomes, ideally, a process of exchange.” (Intro) | “Exemplary teaching is enactment and can be mute. Perhaps it ought to be.” (Intro) | “One might say that whoever grasps Socrates’s intention is made an autodidact, especially in ethics.” (ch. 1) | “And it has been shown that the geometrical proof that Socrates elicits by his midwifery from the slave boy in Meno is unsound.” (ch. 1) | “The very word ‘Master’ carries the stain of slavery.” (ch. 5)

Gulliver’s Travels

• “I could see distinctly the Limbs of these Vermin with my naked Eye, much better than those of an European Louse through a Microscope; and their Snouts with which they rooted like Swine.” (II.4)
• “I should have been curious enough to dissect one of them, if I had proper Instruments (which I unluckily left behind me in the Ship)” (II.4)
• “whose large Opticks were not so acute as mine in viewing smaller Objects” (II.3)
• “the Stumps whereof they plainly discovered through a Magnifying-Glass” (II.3)
• “although their largest Telescopes do not exceed three Feet, they magnify much more than those of a Hundred with us, and shew the Stars with greater Clearness.” (III.3)
• “So that I really began to imagine my self dwindled many Degrees below my usual Size.” (II.3)
• Editor’s note: “unpleasant picture of enormously magnified insects was possibly intended as a satire on such members of the Royal Society as Robert Hooke, whose Micrographia (1665) contained some striking micrographical illustrations of fleas and flies” (Explanatory Notes, II.3)
• Excerpt: II.1, the skins passage

Of Stigmatology: Punctuation as Experience

• “For punctuation is never merely a matter of style or rhetoric in the common sense: It is force; it is power; it is political decision.” (p. 2)
• “The sensations, the events, that strike or dot me must be marked, punctuated, for me to have lived them.” (p. 2)
• “Punctuation as the doubling blow, as the singular flash or clap that, remarking what happens, allows us to have and to inscribe an experience of it.” (p. 4)
• “Besides the punctuation of sentences, there is what literary theorists call the punctuation of the page or work. The concept of punctuation thus overflows itself in all directions, since it ends up including blank spaces as well as chapter breaks” (p. 5)
• “Far from being able to anchor anything or anyone somewhere, the button point is unbuttoned.” (p. 22)
• “A subject that one can thus think, in the image of Perekladin, as at once punctuated and punctuating” (p. 31)
• “opinion itself is not a matter of opinion, far from it: It is a construction that is a matter of a technology of pointing and punctuation.” (p. 101)

In Praise of Shadows

• “Every household has experienced a time when the master has had to scold a maid who unwittingly polished a silver bowl just as it finally gained an elegant patina.” (p. 29)
• “This “sheen of antiquity” that we hear so much about is, in reality, just dirt.” (p. 32)
• “the caress of a hand in the same place smooths the surface as the oil from the skin permeates the ceramics. It is this that creates the sheen—so in other words, yes, it’s just dirt.” (p. 32)
• “Indeed, to build a Japanese home, we first open an umbrella to create shade over the location, and in the dim light of that shadow we construct our house.” (p. 43)
• “The elders of the last century yearned for the era of two centuries ago; those of two centuries ago longed for that of three centuries ago—the conclusion being that those of any era will not be satisfied with the present.” (p. 78)
• “I would deepen the eaves of the temple of literature, darken its walls and push all things ostentatious into the darkness, stripping all unnecessary decorations from the interior.” (p. 83)

Thomas Chatterton’s Art: Experiments in Imagined History

• “Yet the righting of historical error is often not the end of a story, for error itself can be a particularly eloquent sort of evidence if we put the right questions to it.” (p. 4 [PDF 15])
• “When we wish to persuade ourselves of the reality of imagined worlds, of fantasies, or dreams, we thicken the imagining, persuading ourselves, as it were, by sheer weight of detail.” (p. 49 [PDF 60])
• “In the earlier group, literature seems to be a byproduct of fantasy; in the later group, fantasy is used to promote literature.” (p. 52 [PDF 63])
• “Walter Skeat noticed that the Anglo-Saxon words in these arms, thoughtfully glossed for Walpole, were all taken from the A entries in an Anglo-Saxon dictionary.” (p. 67 [PDF 78])
• “I believe both Macpherson & Chatterton, that what they say is ancient is so,” (Blake, quoted p. 5 [PDF 16])
• “Chatterton had studied the tastes of this potential patron to very good effect.” (p. 67 [PDF 78])

Bartleby & Co.

• ‘I never had much luck with women. … Apart from that, I am happy. Today most of all because, on this day 8 July 1999, I have begun this diary that is also going to be a book of footnotes commenting on an invisible text, which I hope will prove my reliability as a tracker of Bartlebys.’ (opening)
• ‘the illness, the disease, endemic to contemporary letters, the negative impulse or attraction towards nothingness …’ (opening)
• ‘for a while now I’ve been staring at my fingers. I think this week I’ve been totally under the influence of Goethe …’ (note 24)
• ‘There is the proof, if anyone was in doubt, that Kafka suffered from Bartleby’s syndrome.’ (note 24)
• ‘The problem with Salinger is that he had a certain tendency to repeat himself.’ (note 31)
• ‘He had renounced writing for good and, with the strange gesture of his escape, announced the modern belief that all literature is the denial of itself.’ (note 86)

The Art of Thought

• “it is desirable not only that there should be an interval free from conscious thought on the particular problem concerned, but also that that interval should be so spent that nothing should interfere with the free working of the unconscious or partially conscious processes of the mind. In those cases, the stage of Incubation should include a large amount of actual mental relaxation.” (ch. IV, PDF p. 103)
• “Even in exploring the same problem, the mind may be unconsciously incubating on one aspect of it, while it is consciously employed in preparing for or verifying another aspect.” (PDF p. 97)
• “And yet a thinker of good health and naturally fertile mind may have to be told that mere industry is for him, as it was for Trollope in his later years, the worst temptation of the devil.” (PDF p. 104)
• “in that periphery or ‘fringe’ of consciousness which surrounds our ‘focal’ consciousness as the sun’s ‘corona’ surrounds the disk of full luminosity.” (PDF p. 111)
• “Each was followed by a period of Verification, in which both the validity of the idea was tested, and the idea itself was reduced to exact form.” (PDF p. 96)

Gravity and Grace

• “We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.” (ch. 26, ‘Attention and Will’)
• “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.” (ch. 26)
• “By pulling at the bunch, we make all the grapes fall to the ground.” (ch. 26)
• “Attention alone—that attention which is so full that the ‘I’ disappears—is required of me.” (ch. 26)
• “The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real.” (ch. 26)

Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom

• “What learning dey would get in dem days, dey been get it at night. Taught demselves.” (Louisa Gause, ch. 1 epigraph) | “Some slaves copied letters and words whose meanings they could not yet decipher onto fences and in the dirt.” (ch. 1) | “Some young man, some woman, or old preacher, in cellar, or shed, or corner of a Negro meeting-house, with the alphabet in hand, or a torn spelling-book, is their teacher.” (Alvord, ch. 6) | “Teaching amounted to a political act for African Americans in the emancipation period. And it was an act of courage.” (ch. 6) | “But why have a Freedman’s Primer any more than a Dutchman’s Primer or an Irishman’s Primer?” (ch. 7 epigraph) | Excerpt ch. 1 (pit schools) | Appendix: NC 1830–31 ‘the use of figures excepted’

Jottings Under Lamplight

• “Citizens of an ignorant and weak nation, no matter how healthy and sturdy their bodies, can serve as nothing more than subject matter for or spectators of meaningless public displays.” (Preface to Outcry, 1923, trans. Eileen J. Cheng, p. 21)
• “The masses (especially in China) have always been spectators at a play. If the sacrificial victim is bold and brave when he takes the stage, they are watching a tragedy; if he cringes and cowers, they are watching a farce.” (What Happens after Nora Walks Out, 1924, trans. Bonnie S. McDougall, p. 261)
• “There is nothing you can do with people like this; the only cure is to give them nothing to watch.” (ibid., p. 261)
• “Beheading is the best method, since they’ll neither speak out nor think anymore.” (The Divergence of Art and Politics, 1928, p. 212)
• “The neck is the most delicate part of the body, so we invented decapitation; the knee joint is capable of bending, so we invented the gesture of kneeling” (The Decline of the Western Suit, 1934, trans. Eileen J. Cheng, p. 280)
• “Efforts to find this slide have come to naught” (Editors’ Introduction, p. 8)

The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States

• “For most of the nineteenth century, doctors believed that between 70 and 90 percent of insanity cases were curable, but only if patients were treated in specially designed buildings.” (Intro, p. 1) | “(A patient did not need the asylum to be a lunatic, but a doctor needed the asylum to be a psychiatrist.)” (Intro, p. 7) | “The Kirkbride plan, also known as the linear plan, was a type of congregate plan, made up of short but connected pavilions, arrayed in a shallow V.” (p. 51) | “These wards would be used to categorize patients by severity of disease, with the noisiest patients farthest away from the center.” (p. 60) | “But the classification system was also a management device—a transfer to a nicer ward was a reward for a well-behaved patient. Relocation to a lower ward was a punishment.” (p. 64) | “The interior space of the asylum was strictly hierarchical, and patients were constantly aware of their place within the numerical wards.” (p. 65)

Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada

• “Squatting, I pulled the / turnip up by the root.” (‘Mad Daughter and Big-Bang’, p. 11 [PDF 12])
• “Bear yourself with a serious air through the labyrinth of the market.” (p. 26 [PDF 27])
• “Given the date of this letter, Yasusada could only have had the original French version.” (editors’ note, p. 79 [PDF 80])
• “Yes, we sent to magazines that we thought reached important audiences in the poetry community, both here and in England.” (p. 128 [PDF 129])
• “we would like to propose that if the Yasusada materials are merely ‘fakes,’ then so are the pseudonymous works of Pessoa, Pushkin, and Kierkegaard” (p. 128 [PDF 129])
• “His attendance must have been sporadic indeed since Hiroshima University was not founded until 1949.” (Perloff, p. 156 [PDF 157])
• “What we need are not more ‘authentic’ and ‘sensitive’ witnesses to what we take to be exotic cultural and ethnic practices” (Perloff, p. 175 [PDF 176])

Avant-Garde Museology

• “Contemporary life has invented crematoria for the dead, but each dead man is more alive than a weakly painted portrait. In burning a corpse we obtain one gram of powder: accordingly, thousands of graveyards could be accommodated on one chemist’s shelf.” (Malevich, p. 270) | “Our contemporary life should have as its slogan: “all that we have made is made for the crematorium.”” (Malevich, p. 270) | “enough pawning the graveyards of Vagankovo, enough singing requiems—none of this will rise again.” (Malevich, p. 270) | “Our job is not to photograph remains—that is what photographs are for.” (Malevich, p. 272) | “A museum, we could say, is a cemetery that has been transported and placed in the center of the city” (Fedorov, p. 132) | “Is cremation at all necessary, or is it better to abide by the age-old custom of burying the dead?” (Levitsky, p. 555) | “This is not just a technical error, but a crude ideological blunder on the part of the exhibition’s organizers.” (Levitsky, p. 556)

The Invisible Collection

• “he took out of the folio a mount framing a blank, yellowed sheet of paper, and held the worthless scrap out in front of him with enthusiasm.” (≈68%)
• “his whole face magically expressing the intent gesture of a man looking at a fine work” (≈69%)
• “there you see the stamp of the Nagler collection, here the stamps of Remy and Esdaile” (≈67%)
• “to where the invisible collectors’ stamps that existed only in his imagination would have been” (≈72%)
• “we put reprints or similar sheets of paper in the old mounts instead of the prints we had sold, so that he wouldn’t notice when he touched them.” (≈56%)
• “Just promise me to draw up a handsome catalogue: it will be my tombstone, and I couldn’t ask for a better memorial.” (≈92%)
• “‘Collectors are happy men.’” (last line)