I’ve read that Goethe, Hans Christian Andersen, and Lewis Carroll were managers of their own miniature theaters. There must have been many other such playhouses in the world. We study the history and literature of the period, but we know nothing about these plays that were being performed for an audience of one.
"Like those of Cervantes and Flaubert, the inventions of all great literary creators both break down the walls of our realist prison and transport us into realms of fantasy, and also open our eyes to hidden and secret aspects of our condition and equip us to explore and better to understand the depths of human behaviour. When we say ‘Borgesian’, we immediately move out of routine and rational reality into a fantastic, rigorous and elegant mental construction, almost always labyrinthine, full of literary references and allusions. This singular world is not strange to us, however, because we recognise in it hidden desires and intimate truths about ourselves that only became apparent thanks to the literary creation of a Jorge Luis Borges."
Mario Vargas Llosa, Touchstones, from “Literature and Life”
“No one can say that we are wanting in faith. The mere fact of our living is itself inexhaustible in its proof of faith.”
“You call that proof of faith? But one simply cannot not live.”
“In that very ‘simply cannot’ lies the insane power of faith; in that denial it embodies itself.”
*
You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
"
from “Reflections on Sin, Pain, Hope, and the True Way,” Franz Kafka, in The Great Wall of China: Stories and Reflections
"If all the seconds and minutes were exactly the same, as marked on a clock, we would not always have time to explain what takes place in them, the substance they contain, but fortunately for us the episodes of greatest significance tend to occur in seconds of long duration and minutes that are spun out, which makes it possible to discuss at length and in some detail without any serious violation of the most subtle of the three dramatic unities, which is time itself."
(from The Year in the Death of Ricardo Reis by José Saramago)
