“‘…do you think we might perhaps discover their inner law, after a few centuries of observations?’” #ibid

“In [de Maistre’s] view, one fact alone remained unchanged in the history of the universe: the spilling of human blood. Once I even found myself thinking he was mad, when he asked, fixing me in the eye: ‘If we had records of massacres in the same way that we have meteorological records,…

“…Excessive ridicule—its relentless, daily production—can lead to the total neutralization of its destructive power.” #wirn

“…ways of life that we ignore? Who is acquainted with the passions, the pleasures, the embraces of these dead?” #ibid

“In one of [Chateaubriand’s] many meditations on graveyards, which are often interchangeable…we find these phrases: ‘Is it certain everything is emptiness and absence in the realm of tombs? Will there not be existences of nothingness, thoughts of dust? Could those bones not perhaps have…

Everyone was so worried when Tina Brown took over, but her record for publishing good new writers—Thom Jones was an early one who quelled a lot of the those worries, at least for me—is redoubtable in comparison to Remnick’s. (Though I still wish she had held onto Terence Rafferty.)

"If a sense of ill ease grew in them as they chewed it was because that meat must have had for them the taste of stale shadow and oft-repeated errors. Since the external was pure appearance, they knew deep down that they were chewing on nothing."
(N.B.: Saer is writing about cannibals, here.)

"The apartment was paneled entirely in heavy rich walnut. I have seen the Pasha's royal chambers in Istanbul and the Tsar's in St. Petersburg and never have I seen anything as sumptuous as the wood in Roy Scheider's apartment."

“Thus what we see and hear comes to be similar and even the same as what we didn’t see or hear, it’s just a question of time, or of our own disappearance.”

“Our inner, familial, linguistic lives are increasingly homogenous, civilized, collective; heterogeneity is not man’s destiny.”

“[Nanni] fell on her knees, confessed that Ottilie had been eating almost nothing for a considerable time. Urged to by Ottilie, Nanni had eaten the meals herself; she had kept quiet about it because…her mistress had pleaded and threatened, and also, she added innocently, because it tasted so good.”

“…The barb of the one emotion lacerated her. The barb of the other she would save to dilacerate Him.” #wirn