"When you want something for a long time, it's very difficult to stop wanting it, I mean, to admit or realize that you no longer desire it or that you would prefer something else. Waiting feeds and fosters that desire, waiting is accumulative as regards the thing awaited, it solidifies desire and turns it to stone and then to resist acknowledging that we have wasted years expecting a signal, which, when it finally comes, no longer tempts us, or else we simply can't be bothered to answer a belated call that we no longer trust, perhaps because it doesn't now suit us to move. One grows accustomed to waiting for an opportunity that never comes, feeling deep down rather calm and safe and passive, unable quite to believe that it never will present itself."

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The Infatuations by Javier Marías

 

"—and I wept until I experienced a powerful, almost sexual relief."

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Transcription by Ben Lerner

 

"Like everything you've waited for for a long time, when it becomes real it loses a large part of its reality, shedding reality in strips along the torturous path of desire."

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Artforum by César Aira

 

"She was unable to escape the sense that the most intense love of her life was now in the past. The love was in the past. The love itself was in the past—she no longer felt it, not even in a lesser, hugely-watered-down form. She no longer felt it. It no longer existed."

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Spring by David Szalay

 

"It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many."

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The Ballad of the Sad Café by Carson McCullers

 

"The fact is I found nothing at all amusing about it. I told myself: here we go again. Again the ambiguity, the groping, the unanswered questions about all this green."

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Self-Portrait in Green by Maria Ndiaye

 

"It is when the fantastic and the real are mixed together in a way that makes it impossible to tell them apart. It's no longer a question of an interruption, where elements of reality remain and an inexplicable phenomenon occurs, but rather a total transformation: the real becomes fantastic and therefore the fantastic becomes real, simultaneously and without us knowing exactly what belongs to one and what to the other."

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Literature Class by Julio Cortázar

 

"...there is no wall and no horror just Transcendental Empty Kissable Milk Light of Everlasting Eternity's true and perfectly empty nature..."

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Tristessa by Jack Kerouac

 

"'Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is. Such endurance is, as it happens, the distillate of what is, today, in this world neither you nor I have made, heroism. Heroism.'"


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Something to Do With Paying Attention by David Foster Wallace

 

"One part of the city looked like Tampa and the other part looked like a medieval asylum."

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The Rum Diary by Hunter S. Thompson

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