“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