Who decides what is margin and what is text? Who decides where the borders of the homeland run? Absences and silences are potent. ...It is the eloquent margins which frame the official history of the land. As for geography, there are divisions and boundary lines that fissure any state more deeply than the moat it digs around the nationhood. In every country there are gaping holes. People fall through them and disappear. Yet on every side there are also doors to a wider place, a covert geography under sleep where all the waters meet.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He was calm; however, he had to be supported during the journey through the long corridors, since he planted his feet unsteadily, ...like a child who has just learned to walk, or as if he were about to fall through like a man who has dreamt that he is walking on water only to have a sudden doubt: but is this possible?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Theater of cruelty" means a theater difficult and cruel for myself first of all. And, on the level of performance, it is not the ...cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other's bodies, carving up our personal anatomies, or, like Assyrian emperors, sending parcels of human ears, noses, or neatly detached nostrils through the mail, but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has been created to teach us that first of all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The morning rose, that untouched stands Armed with her briars, how sweet she smells!... But plucked and strained through ruder hands, Her sweets no longer with her dwells, But scent and beauty both are gone, And leaves fall from her, one by one.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The great advantages of simulation and dissimulation are three. First to lay asleep opposition and to surprise. For where a man's ...intentions are published, it is an alarum to call up all that are against them. The second is to reserve a man's self a fair retreat: for if a man engage himself, by a manifest declaration, he must go through, or take a fall. The third is, the better to discover the mind of another. For to him that opens himself, men will hardly show themselves adverse; but will fair let him go on, and turn their freedom of speech to freedom of thought.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when t...he stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger.... Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one's nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one's nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one's robes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Speech is after all only a system of gestures, having the peculiarity that each gesture produces a characteristic sound, so that i...t can be perceived through the ear as well as through the eye. Listening to a speaker instead of looking at him tends to make us think of speech as essentially a system of sounds; but it is not; essentially it is a system of gestures made with the lungs and larynx, and the cavities of the mouth and nose. We get still farther away from the fundamental facts about speech when we think of it as something that can be written and read, forgetting that what writing, in our clumsy notations, can represent is only a small part of the spoken sound, where pitch and stress, tempo and rhythm, are almost entirely ignored. But even a writer or reader, unless the words are to fall flat or meaningless, must speak them soundlessly to himself. The written or printed book is only a series of hints, as elliptical as the neumes of Byzantine music, from which the reader thus works out for himself the speech-gestures which alone have the gift of expression.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Fruit cannot drop through this thick air... fruit cannot fall into heat that presses up and blunts the points of pears and rounds the grapes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have been required to put roots and shoots and little stems and tendrils together much as their author did, to wander discourage...d and confused as Hansel and Gretel through a dark wood of witches, to strike the hot right way suddenly, but just as suddenly to mire, to drag, to speed, to shout Urreek! to fall asleep, to submit to revelations, certainly to curl a lip, to doubt, unnose a disdainful snort, snick a superior snicker, curse, and then at some point not very pleasantly to realize that the game I'm playing is the game of creation itself, because Tender Buttons is above all a book of kits like those from which harpsichords or paper planes or model bottle boats are fashioned, with intricacy no objection, patience a demand, unreadable plans a pleasure.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »