"The erotic apparition of two blind children, their sockets are hollow and seem to have been filtered through with blue, the one, bigger, is holding the other by the shoulder, and they charge through the crowd with savagery, they must have terrible secrets."
from The Mausoleum of Lovers, the notebooks of Hervé Guibert (trans. Nathanael, published by Nightboat)
"Whatever I take, I take too much or too little; I do not take the exact amount. The exact amount is no use to me."
from Antonio Porchia’s Voices, translated by W.S. Merwin
"Literary dilettantes can be recognized by their desire to connect everything. Their products hook sentences together with logical connectives even though the logical relationship asserted by those connectives does not hold. To the person who cannot truly conceive anything as a unit, anything that suggests disintegration or discontinuity is unbearable; only a person who can grasp totality can understand caesuras. But the dash provides instruction in them. In the dash, thoughts becomes aware of its fragmentary character. It is no accident that in the era of the progressive degeneration of language, this mark of punctuation is neglected precisely insofar as it fulfills its function: when it separates things that feign a connection. All the dash claims to do now is to prepare us in a foolish way for surprises that by that very token are no longer surprising."
Adorno on the em dash
"There is a ‘black wind,’ the beshabar, a dry melancholy wind that blows northeasterly out of the Caucasus. Even such winds as these have their own merit… the clouds brandish great masses of shadow.”
Robert Louis Stevenson, as quoted by Alexander Theroux in the essay, “Black”
