"Words can be tiresome as a swarm of insects. They can prick and buzz. Words can be no more than a series of farts; or on the other hand they can be adamantine, obdurate, inviolable, stone upon stone"

Muzzlehatch, in Titus Alone, by Mervyn Peake

 "Far from flowing in laminar and continuous lines, like a well-behaved river under a bridge, upstream to downstream, time descends, turns back on itself, stops, starts, bifurcates ten times, divides and blends, caught up in whirlpools and counter-currents, hesitant, aleatory, uncertain and fluctuating, multiplied into a thousand beds like the Yukon river. Sometimes time passes, sometimes not; but when it passes, it does so as if through a colander... and this filter or percolator supplies the best model for the flow of time." 

- Michael Serres, Science and the Humanities: The Case of Turner

(via Matt M)

 "The artist is not obliged to understand his own art"

Adorno, Notes on Kafka

Thomas Beecham  

 "To hell with the fourth dimension. It's now that matters!"

Crack-Bell, from Titus Alone, by Mervyn Peake

 ‘Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well, yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really . . . How many more times will you watch the  full moon rise? Perhaps twenty . . . and yet it all seems limitless.’ 

- Paul Bowles

 'One cumulative effect of mass communication nowadays is that, though transient in intention, it more and more puts itself on record. So the music, manners, and modes of the past are instantly and synchronously to hand in a way they have never been before. Revivals of style can go with ever-gathering speed. The cycle, rubbish-camp-acceptable-antique, has now become almost totally telescoped. Mass communication is like the memories in a mind half-asleep. Or like your mind when drowning? In everything, the mass media are flatteners and foreshorteners, like zoom-lens photography. Every high street with the same advertised brands; every newscast with the same news; every singer with the same tune. Even what is local becomes merely another candidate for mass consumption : good for a joke by Eddie Waring on It's a Knockout.'

Paul Barker, introduction to Arts in Society, a collection of writing from New Society, 1977.