He saw that he was in the land of Phenomenon where he must for a certain one day die as he was like the rest too a passing show.

James Joyce, Ulysses

We are means to those small creatures within us and nature has other ends than we.

James Joyce, Ulysses

For an advertisement you must have repetition.  That's the whole secret.

James Joyce, Ulysses

Flatter.  Rarely.  But flatter.

James Joyce, Ulysses

His own image to a man with that queer thing genius is the standard of all experience, material and moral.  Such an appeal will touch him.  The images of other males of his blood will repel him.  He will see in them grotesque attempts of nature to foretell or to repeat himself.

James Joyce, Ulysses

Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.

James Joyce, Ulysses

This owner, that.  Landlord never dies they say.  Other steps into his shoes when he gets his notice to quit.  They buy the place up with gold and still they have all the gold.

James Joyce, Ulysses

The soul is in a manner all that is: the soul is the form of forms.

James Joyce, Ulysses

Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass?

James Joyce, Ulysses

Quiero hacer contigo
Lo que la primavera
Hace con los cerezos

Pablo Neruda, Poem 14 of the Twenty Poems of Love

He did not think he was fleeing from anything behind him, nor, most importantly, towards anything in front of him; in other words he fully accepted the paradox implied in the conclusion that his movements had direction but no aim.

László Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance

He had to ignore the itch, the desire to intervene, for the purpose and significance of action were being corroded away by its thoroughgoing lack of significance.

László Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance

I want to be an idiot and tell the king good and proper that his country is rubbish.

László Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance

For decades he had acted in the belief that his intellect and sensibility led him to reject a world whose products were unbearable to either intellect or sensibility, but were always available for criticism by the same.... such mad grandiosely dignified declarations could hardly be regarded as anything but eccentric.  However, this did not stop him making them.

László Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance

I still cannot understand why it should be the cause of such universal celebration ... that we have climbed out of the trees.

László Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance

Our every moment is passed in a procession across dawns and day's-ends of the orbiting earth, across successive waves of winter and summer, threading the planets and the stars.

László Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance

He took it for granted that his great concern for the universe was unlikely to be reciprocated by the universe for him. ... His relationship to his fellow human beings was governed by the same unconscious assumption; being unable to detect mutability where there plainly wasn't any, he made like the raindrop relinquishing hold of the cloud which contained it.

László Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance

Nobody with four Aces wants a New Deal.

From Davos 2012 by way of The New Yorker of March 5, 2012

If I acted, then the faith would surely follow.  After that, I would believe because I had acted.

John le Carre, Absolute Friends

How could anybody, let alone a man like me, expect to blend in in a land where the people are so very, very small.

T. Coraghessan Boyle, "Los Gigante" in The New Yorker of February 6, 2012.