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Lewis Carroll

'I don't understand you,' said Alice. 'It's dreadfully confusing!'

'That's the effect of living backwards,' the Queen said kindly: 'it always makes one a little giddy at first--'

'Living backwards!' Alice repeated in great astonishment. 'I never heard of such a thing!'

... 'For instance, now,' she went on, ... 'there's the King's Messenger. He's in prison now, being punished: and the trial doesn't even begin till next Wednesday: and of course the crime comes last of all.'

'Suppose he never commits the crime?' said Alice.

'That would be all the better, wouldn't it?' the Queen said.
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- Through the Looking Glass

T. S. Eliot

And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
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Burnt Norton
No. 1 of 'Four Quartets'

Robert Browning

Escape me?
Never—
Beloved!
While I am I, and you are you,
So long as the world contains us both,
Me the loving and you the loth,
While the one eludes, must the other pursue.
My life is a fault at last, I fear:
It seems too much like a fate, indeed!
Though I do my best I shall scarce succeed.
But what if I fail of my purpose here?
It is but to keep the nerves at strain,
To dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall,
And, baffled, get up and begin again,—
So the chase takes up one's life, that's all.
While, look but once from your farthest bound
At me so deep in the dust and dark,
No sooner the old hope goes to ground
Than a new one, straight to the self-same mark,
I shape me—
Ever
Removed!
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Life in a Love

John Donne

Twice or thrice had I loved thee,
Before I knew thy face or name;
So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame,
Angels affect us oft, and worshipped be;
Still when, to where thou wert, I came,
Some lovely glorious nothing I did see,
But since my soul, whose child love is,
Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do,
More subtle than the parent is
Love must not be, but take a body too,
And therefore what thou wert, and who
I bid love ask, and now
That it assume thy body, I allow,
And fix itself in thy lip, eye, and brow.

Whilst thus to ballast love I thought,
And so more steadily to have gone,
With wares which would sink admiration,
I saw, I had love's pinnace overfraught,
Every thy hair for love to work upon
Is much too much, some fitter must be sought;
For, nor in nothing, nor in things
Extreme, and scatt'ring bright, can love inhere;
Then as an angel, face and wings
Of air, not pure as it, yet pure doth wear,
So thy love may be my love's sphere;
Just such disparity
As is 'twixt air and angels' purity,
'Twixt women's love, and men's will ever be.
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Air and Angels

Jorge Luis Borges

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
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An American Life

(via Graham Linehan)

Lucy Suchman

...a change in our view of objects from passive and outside the social could help to undo the subject-object binary and all of its attendant orderings, including, for example, male-female, mental-manual, us-them.
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'Agencies at the Interface' in Human-Machine Reconfigurations

Julio Cortázar

‘What I remember best is the grimace that twisted his mouth askew, it covered his face with wrinkles, changed somewhat both in location and shape because his lips trembled and the grimace went from one side of his mouth to the other as though it were on wheels, independent and involuntary. But the rest stayed fixed, a flour-powdered clown or bloodless man, dull dry skin, eyes deepset, the nostrils black and prominently visible, blacker than the eyebrows or hair or the black necktie. Walking cautiously as though the pavement hurt his feet; I saw patent-leather shoes with such thin soles that he must have felt every roughness in the pavement.’
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Las Babas del Diablo ('Blow Up')

Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.


Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening
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Brian Massumi

“When I think of my body and ask what it does to earn that name, two things stand out. It moves. It feels. In fact it does both at the same time.”

Parables for the Virtual
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Theodor Adorno

We can tell whether we are happy by the sound of the wind. It warns the unhappy man of the fragility of his house, hounding him from shallow sleep and violent dreams. To the happy man it is the song of his protectedness: its furious howling concedes that it has power over him no longer.

Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, 1974
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Estória do Gato e da Lua

Mary Gaitskill

She was deliberately morbid in all her gestures, sensitive, arrogant, vulnerable to flattery. She veered between extravagant outbursts of opinion and sudden, uncertain halts, during which she seemed to look to him for approval. She was in love with the idea of intelligence, and she overestimated her own. Her sense of the world, though she presented it aggressively, could be, he sensed, snatched out from under her with little or no trouble. She said, 'I hope you are a savage.'

A Romantic Weekend
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Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, - no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, - my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, - all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and parcel of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintences, master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.

Nature
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Emily Dickinson

Good Morning -- Midnight --
I'm coming Home --
Day -- got tired of Me --
How could I -- of Him?

Sunshine was a sweet place --
I liked to stay --
But Morn -- didn't want me -- now --
So -- Goodnight -- Day!

I can look -- can't I --
When the East is Red?
The Hills -- have a way -- then --
That puts the Heart -- abroad --

You -- are not so fair -- Midnight --
I chose -- Day --
But -- please take a little Girl --
He turned away!

Poem 425 

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Edward Thomas

I have come to the borders of sleep, 
The unfathomable deep
Forest where all must lose
Their way, however straight, 
Or winding, soon or late;
They cannot choose. 

Many a road and track
That, since the dawn's first crack,
Up to the forest brink, 
Deceived the travellers,
Suddenly now blurs,
And in they sink. 

Here love ends,
Despair, ambition ends;
All pleasure and all trouble,
Although most sweet or bitter, 
Here ends in sleep that is sweeter 
Than tasks most noble. 

There is not any book 
Or face of dearest look
That I would not turn from now 
To go into the unknown
I must enter, and leave, alone, 
I know not how. 

The tall forest towers; 
Its cloudy foliage lowers 
Ahead, shelf above shelf; 
Its silence I hear and obey 
That I may lose my way 
And myself.

Lights Out, 1916 

George Bernard Shaw

'So let us have no more nonsense about the Prussian wolf and the British lamb...we cannot shout for years that we are boys of the bulldog breed and then suddenly pose as gazelles.'

Common Sense About the War, 1914
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James Ellroy

'You musta caught too many in the ring, sonny, 'cause your seabag's leaky. Einstein couldn't remember the names of all Betty's boyfriends, and my name ain't Albert.'

The Black Dahlia
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Michael Sheen

In the supermarket today I thought I saw Michael Sheen browsing the yoghurt drinks. He had on a business suit and dark glasses.

'Nice one, Michael,' I thought. 'Executive disguise. Nice.'

Later when I walked past him again I realised that he had a debilitating limp on one side. Either it wasn't actually Michael Sheen, or he is going to pretty horrific lengths to travel incognito.

As I was standing in the queue to pay with two jars of chutney in my hands ('made', one boasted, 'with genuine apple cider!') the man behind me said, 'that's a lot of chutney for someone so small.'

'Never underestimate the importance of chutney,' I replied.