“... in a time such as ours when everything but what is noteworthy, everything but what is truly original as well as most brilliantly scientific is edited and published, when every year hundreds and thousands of tons of imbecility-on-paper are tossed on the market, all the decrepit garbage of this totally decrepit European civilization, or rather, to hold nothing back, this totally decrepit modern world of ours, this era that keeps grinding out nothing but intellectual muck and all this stinking constipating clogging intellectual vomit is constantly being hawked in the most repulsive way as our intellectual products though it is in fact nothing but intellectual waste products, at such a time it is simply one’s duty to bring out a work of art as unassuming and unadorned as the art of Roithamer's prose...”
— Thomas Bernhard, Correction

“... the thinking man always moves alone into an intensifying darkness.”
— Thomas Bernhard, The Lime Works

 “You know of course that slowness is the only illumination I have ever had.”
— Peter Handke, Slow Homecoming

“When it comes to philosophy, quick solutions should be reduced to a minimum. Careful study comes to you in old age: this sort of slowness is disappearing everywhere. May unending slowness abound.”
— Gonçalo M. Tavares, A Man: Klaus Klump

“There is no point going anywhere else if we do not recognize ourselves in the eyes of the Other.”
— Jean-Claude Izzo, “I Am at Home Everywhere,” in Garlic, Mint & Sweet Basil: Essays on Marseilles, Mediterranean Cuisine, and Noir Fiction

“We’re method thinkers, we’ve decided. A bit like method actors. It’s a question of immersing ourselves in what we study. Of plunging into it. We have to become more Kierkegaardian than Kierkegaard, W. says. More Danish than the melancholy Dane!”
— Lars Iyer, Exodus

“The more I travel the world of living men and study the recorded experience of dead ones, the more I am convinced that mystical powers, religious devotion, intellectual capacity, and ascetic hardihood do not possess anything like the value of noble character.
“I no longer admire a man because he has spent twenty years in the practice of yoga or the study of metaphysics; I admire him because he has brought compassion, tolerance, rectitude, and dependability into his conduct.”
— Paul Brunton

“One thing, however is certain: I have been walking about the city on the Vltava for centuries; I mingle with the crowd, I trudge, I wander, I smell its beer, train smoke and river mud; you can see me where, as Kolár puts it, ‘invisible hands knead the dough of pedestrians on the pavement’s pastry boards’; where, to quote Holan, ‘the croutons of streets spread / with the garlic of the crowd reek a bit.’”
— Angelo Maria Ripellino, Magic Prague

I Knew I Was Doing Something Wrong

Advice from French philosopher Bernard Henri-Lévy: “At 65 years old, when most people are tinkering with their pension plans, he is as kinetic as a man half, even a third, his age. ‘Retire?’ he ripostes when I broach the topic. ‘I am your age!’ Responding to a recent query from a Parisian newspaper about the secret of his perpetual youth, his advice was, ‘Don’t spend time with boring people.’” 

“Murder is just death, after all, death arriving earlier than it should have, but nothing that was not going to happen anyway.”
— Colm Tóibín

Epigraph

“Unless he chooses to commit suicide, a man who believes in nothing must fill his life with things he doesn’t believe in...”
— Richard Zenith on Fernando Pessoa