'But how will you earn your living?' they asked him. 'You can always be a poet as a side line, in your spare time—but how will you keep yourself?'One must be kept, swept, turned inside out, shaken free of insects, polished, pleated, trimmed, preserved in brine which is collected in opaque green bottles from the sea or from tears which fall in the intervals between each death.
-- From Janet Frame, "The triumph of poetry", in The daylight and the dust: Selected short stories, pp.188–212. Virago Press (2010).
There is an awful moment in popular books on cosmic theories (that breezily begin with plain straightforward chatty paragraphs) when there suddenly begin to sprout mathematical formulas, which immediately blind one's brain. We do not go as far as that here.-- Vladimir Nabokov, Ada or Ardor, p.123. Penguin (2015).
It is the sure mark of a shallow and ignorant person to be drawn to odd curiosities and delight in unusual explanations. (?!)-- Yoshida KenkÅ, Essays in Idleness (translated by Meredith McKinney), §116 on p.78. Penguin (2013).
In my childhood I was a fervent worshiper of the tiger. [...] I would stand for hours on end before one of the cages at the zoo; I would rank vast encyclopaedias and natural history books by the splendour of their tigers. [...] My childhood outgrown, the tigers and my passion for them faded, but they are still in my dreams. In that underground sea or chaos, they still endure. As I sleep I am drawn into some dream or other, and suddenly I realize that it's a dream. At those moments, I often think: This is a dream, a pure diversion of my will, and since I have unlimited power, I am going to bring forth a tiger.Oh, incompetence! My dreams never seem to engender the creature I so hunger for. The tiger does appear, but it is all dried up, or it's flimsy-looking, or it has impure vagaries of shape or an unacceptable size, or it's altogether too ephemeral, or it looks more like a dog or bird than like a tiger.
-- From Jorge Luis Borges, Dreamtigers. In The aleph (translated by Andrew Hurley), p.143. Penguin (2000).
He experienced both bliss and horror in contemplating the way an inclined line, rotating spokelike, slid upwards along another, vertical line—in an example illustrating the mysteries of parallelism. The vertical one was infinite, like all lines, and the inclined one, also infinite, sliding along it and rising ever higher as its angle decreased, was doomed to eternal motion, for it was impossible for it to slip off, and the point of their intersection, together with his soul, glided upwards along an endless path. But with the aid of a ruler he forced them to unlock: he simply redrew them, parallel to one another, and this gave him the feeling that out there, in infinity, where he had forced the inclined line to jump off, an unthinkable catastrophe had taken place, an inexplicable miracle, and he lingered long in those heavens where earthly lines go out of their mind.-- Vladimir Nabokov, The Luzhin Defense (translated by Michael Scammwell), p.16. Penguin (2016).
A polished black sedan was a good subject, especially if parked at the intersection of a tree-bordered street and one of those heavyish spring skies whose bloated grey clouds and amoeba-shaped blotches of blue seem more physical than the reticent elms and evasive pavement. Now break the body of the car into separate curves and panels; then put it together in terms of reflections. These will be different for each part: the top will display inverted trees with blurred branches growing like roots into a washily photographed sky, with a whalelike building swimming by—an architectural afterthought; one side of the hood will be coated with a band of rich celestial cobalt; a most delicate pattern of black twigs will be mirrored in the outside surface of the rear window; and a remarkable desert view, a distended horizon, with a remote house here and a lone tree there, will stretch along the bumper.-- Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin. Chapter 4, section 5.
Now it's the challenger's turn to reply to to this verbal bombardment:
Neatly each phrase he dissects. with intelligence subtle and keen;
Harmless around him the adjectives tumble, as he ducks for cover
And squeaks, 'It depends what you mean.'-- Aristophanes, Frogs, in Frogs and Other Plays (trans. Barrett), p.166. Penguin (2007).