[ TANGENTS ]

CONCEPTS

QUOTATIONS

TITLES

QUESTIONS

Quotations from various sources, compiled by the members of Dymproducts. Quotations noted prior to the year 2006 will come online in dribs and drabs.
Numbers only indicate order in which quotation is added to list.

  No.

 Discovered in:

  Quotation

  Source

  2006

  We had no notion that poverty came into the question and was, with ignorance, the chief enemy off freedom. (p. 31 )

  The House of Children, Joyce Carey .

  0 0 2

  2006

  So we gathered sensations, smells, various excitements; only now and then they consolidated into an idea by an accident of attention, some remark. (p. 35)

  Ibid.

  0 0 3

  2006

  The thing is that he does, perhaps, make a figure, but a figures of an indefinite, inderminate sort. Though it would be strange to demand clarity from people
  in a time like ours. (Author’s introduction.)

  Brothers Karamazov, F. Dostoyevsky
  Trans.

  0 0 4

  2006

 …and then suddenly they all felt that now something revolting, absurd, and undoubtedly scandalous was about to happen. (p. 87)

  Ibid.

  0 0 5

  2006

  Because when I fall into the abyss, I go straight into it, head down and heels up, and I’m even pleased that I’m falling in such a humiliating position, and for me
  I find it beautiful. (p.107)

  Ibid.

  0 0 6

 2006

 To insects—sensuality! (p.108)

  Ibid.

  0 0 7

  2005

  . . . Maurice Denis’s provocative dictum of 1890—‘Remember that a picture, before being a battle horse or a nude, or some anecdote—is essentially a flat
  surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.’

  New Yorker, June 13–20, article on
  Gertrude Stein

  0 0 8

 2006

 A man was killed on Friday when a huge hole opened beneath his house in Alta, and after two days of recovery efforts, workers reached the body on Sunday.
 [...] Mr. Chellew was in his livingroom about 9:30pm on Friday when the floor opened beneath him, the authorities said. His wife was in bed and was uninjured.

 AP, New York Times, 04/25/06

  0 0 9

  2004

 There was inherent in the course of history a certain element of going off the course. The present moment was always like the last house of a town which
 somehow no longer quite counts among the townhouses. Each generation asks in amazement Who am I and what were my predecessors? There would be
 more sense in asking: Where am I? and in assuming that one’s predecessors were not of a different kind but merely in a different place. That
 would get us a little further [he thought].

  The Man Without Qualities
  Robert Musil

  0 1 0

 2007

 Not that I was a misfit in our school; quite the contrary. It was senior year and I was a big shot: the very oddities that had made me an object of wonder in my
 first years had, with time’s passing won me fame and envy. And yet this victory did not satisfy me, for it had come about too naturally in accordance
  with orderly processes—one senior class and its leaders graduated and the next came up in succession, like a roller towel being pulled. So it happens in
 real life, but there is something irritating in this slow unfurling of the generations, each with its roster of poets and politicians gradually moving into the
 ascendency, by sheer virtue of staying power; the question of value is begged. (p.145)

 The Figure in the Clock, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Mary McCarthy

  0 1 1

  2007

 "[...]By some pre-temporal assignment, which I have never been able to figure out, I am appointed ’to negate,’ whereas I am sincerely kind and totally unable to
  negate. No, they say, go and negate, without negation there will be no criticism, and what sort of journal has no ’criticism section’? Without criticism, there would be
  nothing but ’Hosannah.’ But ’Hosannah’ alone is not enough for life, it is necessary that this ’Hosannah’ pass through the crucible of doubt, and so on, in the same
  vein. I don’t meddle with any of that, by the way, I didn’t create it, and I can’t answer for it. So they chose themselves a scapegoat, they made me write for the
  criticism section, and life came about. We understand this comedy: I, for instance, demand simply and directly that I be destroyed. No, they say, live, because
  without you there would be nothing. If everything on earth were sensible, nothing would happen. Without you there would be no events, and there must be
  events. And so I serve grudgingly, for the sake of events, and I do the unreasonable on orders. People take this whole comedy for something serious, despite
  all their undeniable intelligence. That is their tragedy. Well, they suffer, of course, but...still they live, they live really, not in fantasy; for suffering is life. Without
  suffering, what pleasure would there be in it—everything would turn intoan endless prayer service: holy, but a bit dull. And me? I suffer, and still I do not live.
  I am an x in an indeterminate equation. I am some sort of ghost of life who has lost all ends and beginnings, and I’ve finally even forgotten what to call
  myself. You’re laughing...no, you’re not laughing, you’re angry again. You’re eternally angry, you want reason only, but I will repeat to you once more that
  I would give all that of life beyond the stars, all ranks and honors, only to be incarnated in the soul of a two-hundred-and-fifty pound merchant’s wife and
  light candles to God."
 "So you don’t believe in God, then?" Ivan grinned hatefully.

  The Brothers Karamazov
  Fyodor Doestoyevsky