A garland of quotations XXXVII

Culled from the finest prometheans in literary history, and re-woven every Monday

Certain books are apparently written not so that we may learn from them, but to demonstrate the fact that the author knew something.
•Goethe, “Own and Adopted Ideas in Proverbial Formulation” (1821).

A cage went in search of a bird.
•Kafka, Zurau Aphoirisms (1917–18).

Legend tells that a giant has been chained to the summit of snowy Elbruz. for committing sins of some sort. When he awakens, he asks his guards, “Are rushes still growing on the earth? Are lambs still being born?”
His pitiless guards respond, “Yes, rushes still grow and lambs are still born.”
Then the giant grew furious. He breaks his shackles, and the earth then shakes as he moves. His chains give off lightning and a roar like thunder. His heavy breathing is the blizzard’s gust. His moaning is the underground drone of a raging river, and his tears are its waters as it emerges into daylight at the foot of Elbruz.
•Khan Girey, Kavkaz #86 (1846).

Numbers, numbers—and one wants so much to find the biggest number, so that the rest may mean something and climb somewhere.
•Nabokov, The Gift (1938).

“Doktor Kafka is very fond of you,” I said to my father. “How did you come to know each other?”
“We know each other through the office,” answered my father.
•Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka: Notes and Reminiscences (1953).

Burgin: Do you think pleasure is the main purpose of literature, if it can be said to have a purpose?
Borges: Well, pleasure, I don’t know, but you should get a kick out of it, no?
• R. Burgin, ed., Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges (1969).

In the last years of her life (she died in 1993, aged eighty-eight), she [Victoria Ocampo] suffered from Alzheimer's and wandered through her large apartment unable to remember where she was. One day, a friend found her reading a book full of stories. Full of enthusiasm, she told the friend (who, of course, she didn't recognize, but by then she had grown accustomed to the presence of strangers) that she would read him something wonderful which she had just discovered. It was a story from one of her first and most famous books, Autobiography of Irene. The friend listened and told her she was right. It was a masterpiece.
•Alberto Manguel, With Borges (2002).

The future casts on me its blissful shadow;
It is nothing but radiant sun:
pierced through by light will I die,
when I have trampled all that is chance, I shall turn away smiling from life.
•Edith Södergran, “Future’s Shadow” (1920).

you are beautiful like murder
my heart expands enormously I choke
your belly is naked like the night
•Georges Bataille, “Eleven Poems Taken from the Archangelical” (ca. 1944?).

                                                 Only
The fool, fixed in his folly, may think
He can turn the wheel on which he turns.
•T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral (1935).

Here it gives the laws for fishing thru the ice—
only one hook to a line,
stay at the hole, can’t go in to warm up,
well, we never go fishing, so they can’t catch us.
•Lorine Niedecker, From This Condensery (1985).

Goethe: Maxims and Reflections (Penguin, 1998); Girey: John Colarusso, ed., Nart Sagas of the Caucasus: Myths and Legends from the Circassians, Abazas, Abkhaz, and Ubykhs (Princeton UP, 2002); Södergran: Love and Solitude: Selected Poems 1916–1923 (Fjord, 1992); Bataille: trans. Mark Spitzer, Collected Poems (Dufour, 1999); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.