The Rings Of Saturn Quotes
"For an hour or more I walked around this somehow extraterritorial part of town."
"It was so oppressive and sultry that one could not leave the windows closed; but if one opened them, one heard the din of traffic from the crossroads and every few minutes the dreadful squeal of the tram."
"After I left the gallery, I sat for a while on the sunlit steps of the palais."
"Who can say how things were in ages past?"
"The flatland stretching out towards Haarlem is seen from above, from a vantage point generally identified as the dunes."
"Indeed, without knowing why, I was so affected by the painting that later it took me a full hour to recover."
"The Hague, at that time with a population of about forty thousand, he felt was the loveliest village on earth."
"I heard the surge of the sea, and, half dreaming, understood every word of Dutch and for the first time in my life believed I had arrived, and was home."
"This story of the burning of the frozen substance of life has, of late, meant much to me."
"The water in the gutter gurgled like a mountain stream."
"If we view ourselves from a great height, it is frightening to realize how little we know about our species, our purpose and our end."
"At the far end of the room, in the dim light that entered by the Belgian bulls'-eye panes, sat a hunchbacked pensioner."
"The funeral of the patriot Apollo Korzeniowski was a great demonstration, conducted in silence."
"The days that remained to her were numbered."
"The most he could do was to alter the odd line or two in his translation of Victor Hugo’s Les travailleurs de la mer."
"The temples, palaces and hermitages, mostly built of cedarwood, went up in flames one after another with unbelievable speed."
"As if after a massacre they lay there in the greenish gloom at the bottom of the gorge."
"And yet they are present everywhere upon the face of the earth, extending their dominion by the hour."
"Apart from a few stone bridges and marble pagodas, all was destroyed."
"Everywhere, on the scree, and on the steep riverbank slopes, gangs of black figures were everywhere at work or moving in bearer columns."
"The more ostentatious the demonstrations of her authority became, the more the fear of losing the infinite power she had so insidiously acquired grew within her."
"Travellers who were in China between 1876 and 1879 report that, in the drought that had continued for years, whole provinces gave the impression of expiring under prisons of glass."
"Parents exchanged children because they could not bear to watch the dying torment of their own."
"The night of time, wrote Thomas Browne in his treatise of 1658, far surpasseth the day and who knows when was the Aequinox?"
"All movement was slowing down. Singly, in groups and in straggling lines, people tottered across the country, and the merest breath of air might suffice to topple them and leave them lying by the wayside forever."
"The denial of time, so the tract on Orbius Tertius tells us, is one of the key tenets of the philosophical schools of Tlön."
"Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artefact we create."
"The making of a fish-hook, manufacture of a china cup, or production of a television programme, all depend on the same process of combustion."
"Night, the astonishing, the stranger to all that is human, over the mountain-tops mournful and gleaming draws on."
"For the time being, our cities still shine through the night, and the fire still spreads."
"But in reality, of course, memory fails us. Too many buildings have fallen down, too much rubble has been heaped up, the moraines and deposits are insuperable."
"Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work."
"Perhaps there is in this as yet unexplained phenomenon of apparent duplication some kind of anticipation of the end."
"For in and out, above, about, below, 'Tis nothing but a Magic Shadow-Show, Play'd in a Box whose Candle is the Sun, Round which the Phantom Figures come and go."
"People were never harmed by the rebels. Evidently burning the houses down was the most effective way of driving out those families who were identified, rightly or wrongly, with the detested rule of the English."
"The only ones who stayed on were those who had no livelihood except what they derived from their estates."
"Nobody in Ireland had any idea how they could possibly go on."
"Great-uncle and the butler, who were both called William, so Quincey told me, and died on the same day, both well past the age of eighty, had their beds in the kitchen."
"Probably it was the servants, who often worked for decades for scant wages and were no more able to find a place elsewhere at so advanced an age than their masters were, who kept things more or less ticking over."
"All of us are fantasists, ill-equipped for life, the children as much as myself."
"We sold off the land bit by bit, which kept the worst at bay for a few years, and as long as we had one or two servants in the house it was still possible to keep up appearances, to the outside world and in our own eyes."
"The fact that I did not do so was a... failure that still sometimes seems like a shadow crossing my soul."
"Promenades and bathing facilities were established, and piers grew out into the sea."
"And yet, what would we be without memory? We would not be capable of ordering even the simplest thoughts, the most sensitive heart would lose the ability to show affection, our existence would be a mere never-ending chain of meaningless moments, and there would not be the faintest trace of a past."
"How wretched this life of ours is! – so full of false conceits, so futile, that it is little more than the shadow of the chimeras loosed by memory."
"I have always kept ducks, he said, even as a child, and the colours of their plumage, in particular the dark green and snow white, seemed to me the only possible answer to the questions that are on my mind."
"The greater the increase of light and labour, the more apparent becomes the profound symbiosis between man and the machines he has invented."
"It is difficult to imagine the depths of despair into which those can be driven who, even after the end of the working day, are engrossed in their intricate designs and who are pursued, into their dreams, by the feeling that they have got hold of the wrong thread."
"When I woke in the morning, everything was in deep darkness. There was no glare from streetlights or houses to dull the sky. But the stars had come out, in a display so resplendent as I had seen only over the Alps when I was a child, or over the desert in my dreams."