Real love

Real love, she says, is when you get as much pleasure from giving pleasure as you do from receiving it.

Paul Auster
Invisible

Poetry Vs Justice

From poetry to justice, then. Poetic justice, if you will. For the sad fact remains: there is far more poetry in the world than justice.

Paul Auster
Invisible

Power is the only constant

Bombastic pronouncements, wild generalizations, bitter declarations about the corruption of all governments - past, present and future; left, right and center - and how our so-called civilization was no more than a thin screen masking a never-ending assault of barbarism and cruelty. Human beings were animals, he said, and soft-minded aesthetes like myself were no better than children, diverting ourselves with hairsplitting philosophies of art and literature to avoid confronting the essential truth of the world. Power was the only constant, and the law of life was kill or be killed, either dominate or fall victim to the savagery of monsters.

Paul Auster
Invisible

Vanity

I was also fascinated by this peculiar, unreadable person, and the fact that he seemed genuinely glad to have stumbled into me stoked the fires of my vanity - than invisible cauldron of self-regard and ambition that simmers and burns in each one of us.

Paul Auster
Invisible

War

Never underestimate the importance of war. War is the purest, most vivid expression of the human soul.

Paul Auster
Invisible

Good sense

A human doesn't have a heart like mine. The human heart is a line, whereas my own is a circle, and I have the endless ability to be in the right place at the right time. The consequence of this is that I'm always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugliness and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both. Still, they have one thing that I envy. Humans, if nothing else, have the good sense to die. 

Markus Zusak

The Book Thief

The act of dying

For some reason, dying men always ask questions they know the answer to. Perhaps it's so they can die being right.

Markus Zusak
The Book Thief

Self-Obsession

A Small Piece of Truth (Death - The narrator)

I do not carry a sickle or scythe.

I only wear a hooded black robe when it's cold.

And I don't have those skull-like

facial feature you seem to enjoy 

pinning on me from a distance. You

want to know what I truly look like?

I'll help you out. Find yourself

a mirror while I continue.

I actually feel quite self-indulgent at the moment, telling you all about me, me, me... On the other hand, you 're human - you should understand self-obession.

Markus Zusak 
The Book Thief

A Young Man

'After all you should know it yourself - a young man is still a boy, and a boy sometimes has the right to be stubborn'

Markus Zusak
The Book Thief

Capacity of escalating

Although something inside told her that this was a crime - after all, her three books were the most precious items she owned - she was compelled to see the thing lit. She couldn't help it. I guess humans like to watch a little destruction. Sandcastles, houses of cards, that's were they begin. Their great skill is the capacity to escalate.

Markus Zusak
The Book Thief

The Forces of my uncertainty

And even if there was an end, it seemed doubtful that I would ever know about it - which meant that the story would go on and on, secreting its poison inside me forever. The struggle was to accept that, to coexist with the forces of my uncertainty. Desperate as I was for a resolution, I had to understand that it might never come. You can hold on to your breath for so long, after all. Sooner or later, a moment comes when you have to start breathing again - even if the air is tainted, even if you know it will eventually kill you.

Paul Auster
Leviathan

The nub of catastrophe

An overly refined conscience, a predisposition toward guilt in the face of his own desires, led a good man to act in curiously underhanded ways, in ways that compromised his own goodness. This is the nub of catastrophe, I think. He accepted everyone else's frailties, but when it came to himself he demanded perfection, an almost superhuman rigor in even the smallest acts. The result was disappointment, a dumbfounding awareness of his own flawed humanity, which drove him to place even more stringent demands on his conduct, which in turn led to ever more suffocating disappointments. If he had learned to love himself a little more, he wouldn't have had the power to cause so much unhappiness around him.

Paul Auster
Leviathan

Men are monsters

'Men are monsters,' I said, unable to stop myself. 'They have ants in their pants, and their heads are crammed with filth. Especially when they are young.'

'Not filth,' Fanny said. 'Just hormones.'

'Those too. But sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.'

'You always wore an earnest look on your face,' she said. 'I remember thinking that you must have been a very serious person. One of those young men who was either going to kill himself or change the world.'

'So far, I haven't done either. I guess that means I 've given up my old ambitions.'

'And a good thing, too. You don't want to get stuck in the past. Life is too interesting for that.'

Paul Auster

Leviathan

On Christianity and Art

In truth, nothing could be more opposed to the purely aesthetic interpretation and justification of the world which are taught in this book that the Christian teaching, which is, and want to be, only moral and which relegates art, every art, to the realm of lies; with its absolute standards, beginning with the truthfulness of God, it negates, judges, and damns art. Behind this mode of thought and valuation, which must be hostile to art if it is at all genuine, I never failed to sense a hostility to life - a furious, vengeful antipathy to life itself: for all of life is based on semblance, art, deception, points of view, and the necessity of perspectives and error. Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life's nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as faith in "another" or "better" life. Hatred of "the world", condemnations of the passions, fear of beauty and sensuality, a beyond invented the better to slander this life, at bottom a craving for the nothing, for the end, for respite, for "the sabbath of sabbaths" - all this always struck me, no less than the unconditional will of Christianity to recognise only moral values, as the most dangerous and uncanny form of all possible forms of a "will to decline" - at the very least a sign of abysmal sickness, weariness, discouragement, exhaustion, and the impoverishment of life. For, confronted with morality (especially Christian, or unconditional, morality), life must continually and inevitably be in the wrong, because life is something essentially amoral - and eventually, crushed by the weight of contempt and the eternal No, life must then be felt to be unworthy of desire and altogether worthless.

The Birth of Tragedy
Friedrich Nietzsche

The Origin of Tragedy

What, then, would be the origin of tragedy? Perhaps joy, strength, overflowing health, overgreat fullness? And what, then, is the significance, physiologically speaking, of that madness out of which tragic and comic are developed - the Dionysian madness? How now? Is madness perhaps not necessarily the symptom of degeneration, decline, and the final stage of culture? Are there perhaps - a question for psychiatrists - neuroses of health? of the youth and youthfulness of a people? Where does that synthesis of god and billy goat in the satyr point? What experience of himself, what urge compelled the Greek to conceive the Dionysian enthusiast and primeval man as satyr? And regarding the origin of the chorus: did those centuries when the Greek body flourished and the Greek soul foamed over with health perhaps know endemic ecstasies? Visions and hallucinations shared by entire communities or assemblies at a cult? How now?

The Birth of Tragedy
Friedrich Nietzsche

The idea and the idol - The Hellenic character

Somebody, I don't know who, has claimed that all individuals, taken as individuals, are comic and hence untragic - from which it would follow that the Greeks simply could not suffer individuals on the tragic stage. In fact, this is what they seem to have felt; and the Platonic distinction and evaluation of the "idea" and the "idol," the mere image, is very deeply rooted in the Hellenic character.

The Birth of Tragedy
Friedrich Nietzsche

That is your world!

All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both.
That is your world! A world indeed! -

The Birth of Tragedy
Friedrich Nietzsche

The Satyr

The satyr, like the idyllic shepherd of more recent times, is the offspring of a longing for the primitive and the natural; but how firmly and fearlessly the Greek embraced the man of the woods, and how timorously and mawkishly modern man dallied with the flattering image of a sentimental, flute-playing, tender shepherd! Nature as yet unchanged by knowledge, with the bolts of culture still unbroken - that is what the Greek saw in his satyr who nevertheless was not a mere ape. On the contrary, the satyr was the archetype of man, the embodiment of his highest and most intense emotions, the ecstatic reveler enraptured by the proximity of his god, the sympathetic companion in whom the suffering of the god is repeated, one who proclaims wisdom from the very heart of nature, a symbol of the sexual omnipotence of nature which the Greeks used to contemplate with reverent wonder.
The satyr was something sublime and divine: thus he had to appear to the painfully broken vision of Dionysian man. The contrived shepherd in his dress-ups would have offended him: on the unconcealed and vigorously magnificent characters of nature, his eye rested with sublime satisfaction; here the true human being was disclosed, the bearded satyr jubilating to his god. Confronted with him, the man of culture shriveled into a mendacious caricature.

The Birth Of Tragedy
Friedrich Nietzsche

Hamlet

In this sense the Dionysian man resembles Hamlet: both have once looked truly into the essence of things, they have gained knowledge, and nausea inhibits action; for their action could not change anything in the eternal nature of things; they feel it to be ridiculous or humiliating that they should be asked to set right a world is out of joint. Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion: that is the doctrine of Hamlet, not that cheap wisdom of Jack the Dreamer who reflects too much and, as it were, from an excess of possibilities does not get around to action. Not reflection, no-true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for action, both in Hamlet and in the Dionysian man.

Now no comfort avails any more; longing transcends a world after death, even the gods; existence is negated along with its glittering reflection in the gods or in an immortal beyond. Conscious of the truth he has once seen, man now sees everywhere only the horror or absurdity of existence; now he understands what is symbolic in Ophelia's fate; now he understands the wisdom of the sylvan god, Silenus: he is nauseated.

Here, when the danger to his will is greatest, art approaches as a saving sorceress, expert at healing. She alone knows how to turn these nauseous thoughts about the horror or absurdity of existence into notions with which one can live: these are the sublime as the artistic taming of the horrible, and the comic as the artistic discharge of the nausea of absurdity. The satyr chorus of the dithyramb is the saving deed of Greek art; faced with the intermediary world of these Dionysian companions, the feelings described here exhausted themselves.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The Birth of Tragedy 

An aesthetic phenomenon

For to our humiliation and exaltation, one thing above all must be clear to us. The entire comedy of art is neither performed for our betterment or education nor are we the true authors of this art world. On the contrary, we may assume that we are merely images and artistic projections for the true author, and that the we have our highest dignity in our significance as works of art - for it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified - while of course our consciousness of our own significance hardly differs from that which the soldiers painted on canvas have of the battle represented on it. Thus all our knowledge of art is basically quite illusory, because as knowing beings we are not one and identical with that being which, as the sole author and spectator of this comedy of art, prepares a perpetual entertainment for itself. Only insofar as the genius in the act of artistic creation coalesces with this primordial artist of the world, does he know anything of the eternal essence of art; for in this state he is, in a marvelous manner, like the weird image of the fairy tale which can turn its eyes at will and behold itself; he is at once subject and object, at once poet, actor, and spectator.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The Birth of Tragedy