Bulgarian-born Swiss and British Jewish modernist novelist, playwright, memoirist, and non-fiction writer (1905–1994)
His meals were always punctual. Whether she cooked well or badly he did not know; it was a matter of total indifference to him. During his meals, which he ate at his writing desk, he was busy with important considerations. As a rule he would not have been able to say what precisely he had in his mouth. He reserved consciousness for real thoughts; they depend upon it; without consciousness, thoughts are unthinkable. Chewing and digestion happen of themselves.
Books have no life; they lack feeling maybe, and perhaps cannot feel pain, as animals and even plants feel pain. But what proof have we that inorganic objects can feel no pain? Who knows if a book may not yearn for other books, its companions of many years, in some way strange to us and therefore never yet perceived?
The freedom to fail is preserved, as a sort of supreme law, which guarantees escape at every fresh juncture. One is inclined to call this the freedom of the weak person who seeks salvation in defeat. His true uniqueness, his special relation to power, is expressed in the prohibition of victory. All calculations originate and end in impotence.
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The crowd is the same everywhere, in all periods and cultures; it remains essentially the same among men of the most diverse origin, education and language. Once in being, it spreads with the utmost violence. Few can resist its contagion; it always wants to go on growing and there are no inherent limits to its growth. It can arise wherever people are together, and its spontaneity and suddenness are uncanny.
Graças a Karl Kraus comecei a compreender que cada indivíduo tem uma configuração lingüística própria, que o distingue de todos os demais. Compreendi que embora os homens falem uns com os outros, não se entendem; que suas palavras são golpes que ricocheteiam nas palavras dos outros; que não existe ilusão maior do que a opinião de que a língua é um meio de comunicação entre seres humanos. Fala-se com a outra pessoa, mas de uma maneira que ela não entende. Continua-se a falar, e ela entende ainda menos. Um grita, o outro grita também: a exclamação, que tem uma vida miserável na gramática, apodera-se da língua. Como bolas, as exclamações saltam para lá e para cá, chocam-se e caem pelo chão. Raramente algo que se diz consegue infiltrar-se nos outros; e, quando isso afinal acontece, é entendido às avessas.
Yes, this was his home. Here no harm could come to him. He smiled at the mere idea that any harm could come to him here. He avoided looking at the divan on which he slept. Every human creature needed a home, not a home of the kind understood by crude knock-you-down patriots, not a religion either, a mere insipid foretaste of a heavenly home: no, a real home, in which space, work, friends, recreation, and the scope of a man's ideas came together into an orderly whole, into — so to speak — a personal cosmos. The best definition of a home was a library.