Thought For Food?!

Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.
— Thomas Hardy

The enormous increases in population seem to have dwarfed the individual. So have modern physics and astronomy. But we may be somewhere between a false greatness and a false insignificance. At least we can stop misrepresenting ourselves and realize that the only thing we can be in this world is human. We are temporarily miracle-sodden and feeling faint.
— Saul Bellow, "The Sealed Treasure" (short essay)

.... He differentiated between existence and Existence, and knew one was preferable, but could never remember which. Human freedom for Needleman consisted of being aware of the absurdity of life. "God is silent," he was fond of saying, "now if we can only get Man to shut up."
— Woody Allen, "Remembering Needleman," in Side Effects, p. 5.

Man is perishable. That may be; but let us perish resisting, and if it be nothingness that awaits us, do not let us so act that it shall be justice.
— Étienne Pivert de Sénancour (1770-1846)

A page is no place for a pen, he said. Laying down his pen to write a sonnet with his tongue on her astonished flesh.
— Anonymous, 6-4-1984.

Like depending on a prop in a wall or expecting unbaked clay to last or trying to fish the moon out of water, you can monkey around with various systems of knowledge; however, you will never, thereby, live forever.
— Reference to a passage on pp. 21-22 in Monkey, by Wu Ch'eng-en, Waley (tran.), Grove Press, 1943.

No one wants a man with a story.
— Richard & Susan Thomas, from the song "Wake Up, Rosa," 1973.

The function of art is to scare the shit out of people.
— Gerald Campbell Forest Allen, Ph.D., April 1, 1984.

Since Hannah Arendt's description of the German war criminals, much has been made of the banality of evil, but rarely has anyone commented on the commonplace mask that greatness often wears. Kierkegaard declared that if he ever met a true "knight of faith," a man whose every moment was lived with an awareness of the infinite, he would exclaim, "Good Lord, is this the man? Why he looks like a tax collector!" For such a man would necessarily be unremarkable on the surface, and his difference from the mass of humanity discernible only in the totality of his internal life. In the same way, many of Beethoven's very best compositions lack the peremptory power, the tragic passion, and the ethereal strangeness of some of his better known works....
— Beginning of a review by Kyle Gann of a concert by Maurizio Pollini given at Orchestra Hall in Chicago on March 11, 1984.

If you set out deliberately to make a masterpiece, how will you ever get it finished?
— George Balanchine

What, what not, nothing. No foundation all the way down the line.
— Arab's speech, in The Time of Your Life, William Saroyan.

As Nathalie Sarraute has pointed out, it is hard for a writer to avoid being buried by the mediocrity surrounding him or even worse, dazzled by the genius of the past.