Translation is just a bottomless pit. There’s no good way to do it and you always up throwing away all your best work, but that’s the name of the game. It does give one to think about language in a way that nothing else does, that no other practical exercise does, because you come to a place where you’re standing at the edge of a word and you can see across a gap the other word, the word you’re trying to translate, and you can’t get there. And that space between the word you’re at and the word you can’t get to is unlike any other space in language. And something there is learned about human possibilities, in that space. I’m not sure what, but I like to test it. It’s humbling.

Anne Carson, interviewed

I called for my horse to be brought from the stable. The servant did not understand me. I myself went into the stable, saddled my horse and mounted.

In the distance I heard a bugle call. I asked him what it meant but he did not know and had not heard it.

By the gate he stopped me and asked, ‘Where are you riding to sir?’ I answered, ‘away from here, away from here, always away from here. Only by doing so can I reach my destination’. ‘Then you know your destination’, he asked. ‘Yes’, I said, ‘I have already said so, “Away-From-Here”, that is my destination’.

‘You have no provisions with you’, he said. ‘I don’t need any’, I said. ‘The journey is so long that I will die of hunger if I do not get something along the way. It is, fortunately, a truly immense journey.’

– Kafka (exegesis)

– This book started out with a feeling of meaninglessness, which is a death sin in the old, you know… It’s the worst thing you can do, to see the world as a meaningless place, because life is a gift, you know…
– Life is a gift?
– Yes, and you throw it away…
– From God?
– I’m not aware, I can’t answer that, but I’m just saying that…
– You’re not a religious person?
– Yes, in a way I am, I’m very interested in those subjects, I’ve written a lot about it, but that also has to do with meaning, of course, and if you’re searching for meaning you have to deal with religion, of course. But before that we were talking about meaninglessness as an art…

– Knausgaard, interview

Which one of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, that he has lost something infinite?

– Borges (via here)

Now I am tempted to say that the right expression in language for the miracle of the existence of the world, though it is not any proposition *in* language, is the existence of language itself. But what then does it means to be aware of this miracle at some times and not at other times? For all I have said by shifting the expression of the miraculous from an expression *by means of language* to the expression *by the existence* of language, all I have said is again that we cannot express what we want to express and that all we *say* about the absolute miraculous remains nonsense.

– Wittgenstein, ‘A Lecture on Ethics’

The hills are unaware that we are watching them, he says. The trees. The insects. This is what is marvellous.

No one is watching us, he says. Nothing sees us.

But at other times, it frightens him, this ‘no one is watching us’. It’s as though not-watching itself is watching; as though the sky, which sees nothing, sees everything in that seeing-nothing.

We can have no secrets from the sky, he says. We are read by the sky.

– Lars Iyer, Wittgenstein Jr. 

It’s when I finished studying it, at the point where I stopped believing in philosophy, that I began to read Nietzsche. Well, I realised that he wasn’t a philosopher, but was more: a temperament. So, I read him, but never systematically, now and then. But I really don’t read him anymore. I consider his letters his most authentic work, because in them he’s truthful, while in his other work he’s prisoner to his vision. In his letters one sees that he’s just a poor fellow, that he’s ill, exactly the opposite of everything he claimed. [...] His work is an unspeakable megalomania. When one reads the letters he wrote at the same time, one sees that he’s lamentable, it’s very touching, like a character out of Chekhov.

– Cioran (via here)

I, too, felt ready to start life all over again. It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.

– Camus, The Stranger (tr. Gilbert)

We have waited a long time for an artist who is brave enough, is at ease enough with the great tornadoes of intuition, to grasp that the break with the outside world entails the break with the inside world, that there are no replacement relations for naive relations, that what are called outside and inside are one and the same.

– Beckett on Bram van Velde (via here)