... a novel.

The long sandy beach, deserted on this weekday, was rather dirty, with waxed paper, plastic wrappers, and cellophane from cigarette packs scattered here and there. The women went right off for a swim, but he said he’d rather wait awhile, that he didn’t like to fling himself into the water just like that. I then asked him to translate a few of the passages in the catalog that I hadn’t entirely understood. After the preface he began to translate the titles of his paintings as well. I told him that those I’d understood but he continued all the same and suddenly, when he’d just read Vuole dire caos and Paura clandestina, he stopped. He was still holding the catalog open in his hands and seemed to be still reading the titles to himself when suddenly he told me that at Dachau they had hung him by the wrists until he fainted. Maybe he would have told me more, but just then the two young women, one Greek and one Spanish, merged from the waves and came back to us, wringing their hair. Drops of water slid from their raised elbows and disappeared into the tufts of their armpits. The drops also slipped down from their bathing suits over their thighs, where they snaked along in thin silvery streams, sometimes suddenly changing direction. He stood up and said he was going to swim a little. He had a powerful, athletic body, and despite the choppy sea he swam with a butterfly stroke. After that, he never again spoke of his arrest, the prison, or what he had undergone in the camp. His centurionlike face, his very slight Italian accent when he spoke French. A few years later I learned that he had died at the hospital in Milan, in unclear circumstances (there was some question of counterindicated medication taken after minor surgery—someone intimated that he had committed suicide). I remember seagulls flying overhead, some of them virtually motionless, their wings outstretched, turning their heads right and left, weightless, held aloft by the light sea wind. From time to time they let out hoarse cries. One of them landed very close by and began to tear at a piece of wax paper half buried in the sand with its beak. I was surprised at its size, its enormous hooked beak, its wild, rapacious look.

—Claude Simon, The Jardin des Plantes, p. 91, translated by Jordan Stump.

... a sketchbook.

We look forward to a journey, maybe for years, and once we are there the main part of our pleasure consists in knowing that we are a memory the richer. A certain sense of disappointment, not in the landscape, but in the human heart. The vision is there, but not yet the experience. We are like a film at the moment of exposure; it is memory that will develop it. At times one wonders to what extent one experiences the present at all.

—Max Frisch, Sketchbook 1946–1949, p. 85, translated by Geoffrey Skelton.

... an English pilgrimage.

... only when all hope of dying a hero’s death was gone, thanks to his underdeveloped body, did he [Swinburne] devote himself unreservedly to literature and thus, perhaps, to a no less radical form of self-destruction.

—W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, p. 163 (of 296), translated by Michael Hulse.

... a short story.

I sipped from my flask and began at last to feel what I usually felt after drinking, which was a feeling that I need no longer trouble myself with reading or writing, since I would shortly see as a result of my drinking what I had for so long been trying to see as a result of my reading and writing.

—Gerald Murnane, "The Interior of Gaaldine," in Stream Systems, the collected short fiction.

... lines.

Heard in the receiver, the words “Now there’s sunlight on my telephone!” filled me with joy at the communicability of human experience.

—Harry Mathews, 20 Lines a Day, 64.

... a play.

Mrs. Fulton: Show by your sympathy that you appreciate the nightmares of existence. Try, try not to smile; try not to say, in an offhand voice, "I imagine these things have always been much the same." I am sure they always have been the same, Augustus; that is why they are so dreadful.

—Nigel Dennis, August for the People, Act I.

... a novel.

I know precisely the quality of my work. I know that it is not very good but not very bad either, perhaps it is good, or good to medium, but at any rate it is incomparably better than most of what is produced today. But why should anybody in this country be interested in what I write? Or why should anybody anywhere be interested, for that matter?

—Gabriel Josipovici, Moo Pak, p. 62.

... a poem.

We milk the cow of the world, and as we do
We whisper in her ear, "You are not true."

—Richard Wilbur, "Epistemology."

... a literary biography.

Baudelaire could not take his enterprises seriously. He realized only too well that one only found in them what one had oneself begun by putting into them.

For a thoughtful person every enterprise is absurd.

—Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire, translated by Martin Turnell.

... the history of England.

If people would be fools, it was the business of a statesman to make use of their folly.

—Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England, Chapter XXI.

... an impression, or possibly a comment.

Faith in the fixity of the soul, like the faith in the fixity of the earth, will not work out even as an ideal conception. (One may leave aside the question of it as a fact. As a fact we should be ready to accept it when it came, while still affirming, with the dying Thoreau: ‘One world at a time, if you please!’) It is not merely that to live a full and rich life in this wonderful world, among these fascinating beings, not even excluding human beings, and to fade away when—or better, before—one has exhausted all one’s power of living, should surely be a fate splendid enough for the greatest. What has always come home to me is that with the dissolution of the body the reasons for desiring the non-dissolution of the soul fall away. If I am to begin a new life, let me begin it washed clean from all my defects and errors and failures in this life, freed from the disillusioning results of all my accumulated memories. But so to begin a new life is to annihilate the old life. The new self would be a self that is not me: what has happened to me would mean nothing to it: what happens to it can mean nothing to me.

—Havelock Ellis, Impressions and Comments, 6 January 1920.

... some note-books.

We are all one animal, and death (which was at first voluntary, and has only come to be disliked because those who did not dislike it committed suicide too easily) and reproduction are only phases of the ordinary waste and repair which goes on in our bodies daily.

—Samuel Butler, The Note-books of Samuel Butler, 55.

... a sentence.

The poem demands the demise of the poet who writes it and the birth of the poet who reads it.

—Carole Maso, Ava, p. 65.

... a novel.

I am going to miss you, she said, raising her eyebrows like somebody forced to admit an error.

—Max Frisch, Montauk, p. 141 of 143. Translated by Geoffrey Skelton.

... a novel.

A white shatterline of lightning crossed from sky to earth in the west toward which they looked. They both counted their heartbeats till the thunder growled, awakened, and rolled away as though muttering to itself.

—John Crowley, The Translator, p. 189.

... a story.

The youngsters are loud in their enjoyment; the erosion going on outside does not worry them in the least.

—Max Frisch, Man in the Holocene, translated by Geoffrey Skelton.