unable to understand

"Most of the time I find my consolation, laugh if you like, Doctor, in inconsolability. If I am alone I feel like being with people; if I am with people I feel like being alone. I go to the greatest pains to understand others as though they were myself and I am utterly unable to understand any mind but my own."

~~ from Gargoyles by Thomas Bernhard

he wasn't fitted for this post

"Instead, he said, in keeping with his nature: I could think of nothing else but that notice in the newspaper. And he said: My wife discouraged me from coming here; she wants me to apply for a position, but she thought this one a bad idea. She said he wasn't fitted for this post, that he was a teacher. She said to him: You're a teacher; and she said, as she invariably did: A bad teacher."

~~ from Gargoyles by Thomas Bernhard

nothing is more irritating than books

"There was not a single book in the industrialist's house, my father said; he deliberately kept books out of the house in order not to be irritated. After all, nothing is more irritating than books if you want to be alone, must be alone."

~~ from Gargoyles by Thomas Bernhard

Gargoyles by Thomas Bernhard

"My father said he wanted to return Kant's Prolegomena and Marx's Dissertation, both of which he had finished. He took the two volumes out of his medical bag and put them down on the table. Then he mentioned the books that he would like to borrow: Nietzsche's On the Future of our Educational Institutions, a French edition of Pascal's Pensées, and Diderot's Mystification."

~~ from Gargoyles by Thomas Bernhard

Injustice has a cure.

No one should die of tuberculosis. Give now.

Donald Zagoria

Legendary historian and author Donald Zagoria passed on at 97 years young earlier this month. He's survived by his son, basketball and tennis journalist Adam Zagoria, and books including Vietnam Triangle: Moscow, Peking, Hanoi. In 1976, Donald had a chance to discuss China on Firing Line with William F. Buckley. Rest in peace, Donald Zagoria.

Do stories have something to say?

“Do stories, apart from happening, being, have something to say? For all my skepticism, some trace of irrational superstition did survive in me, the strange conviction, for example, that everything in life that happens to me also has a sense, that it means something, that life speaks to us about itself through its story, that it gradually reveals a secret, that it takes the form of a rebus whose message must be deciphered, that the stories we live compromise the mythology of our lives and in that mythology lies the key to truth and mystery. Is it an illusion? Possibly, even probably, but I can’t rid myself of the need continually to decipher my own life.”

~~ from The Joke by Milan Kundera

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Eclectica Magazine

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The Complete Works of Rick Harsch

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