First and last sentences of books I like: "Place for me is the locus of desire." "Believing as I do that connection to place is a necessary component of feeling close to people, and to the earth, I wonder what will make it possible for artists to "give" places back to people who can no longer see them, and be given places in turn, by those who are still looking around." The Lure of the Local - Lucy Lippard
"I'm in my mother's room." "It was not raining." - Molloy - Samuel Beckett
"Early in 1880, in spite of a well-founded suspicion as to the advisability of perpetuating that race which has the sanction of the Lord and the disapproval of the people, Hedvig Volkbein - a Viennese woman of great strength and military beauty, lying upon a canopied bed of a rich spectacular crimson, the valance stamped with the bifurcated wings of the House of Hapsfurg, the feather coverlet an envelope of satin on which, in massive and tarnished gold threads, stood the Volkbein arms - gave birth, at the age of forty-five, to an only child, a son, seven days after her physician predicted that she would be taken." "He ran this way and that, low down in his throat crying, and she grinning and crying with him; crying in shorter and shorter spaces, moving head to head, until she gave up, lying out, her hands beside her, her face turned and weeping; and the dog too gave up then, and lay down, his eyes bloodshot, his head flat along her knees." - Nightwood - Djuna Barnes
"The lantern of science, throwing its light down the long corridors of time, enables us to trace out the gradual evolution of terrestrial life." "Students of evolution in the animal world tell us that the ear was the last of the sense-organs to arrive; it is beyond question the most intricate and the most wonderful." - Science and Music - Sir James Jeans
"The earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory, magical; art was an instrument of ritual.""In place of hermeneutics we need an erotics of art." - Against Interpretation - Susan Sontag
"The first was a hare." "With you I can imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough." - And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos." John Berger
"People live on earth, and animals and birds; and fish live in the sea, but we do not defeat the sea, for we are driven back to the sky, or we stay, and become what we have tried to conquer, remembering nothing except our new flowing in and out, in and out, sighing for one place, drawn to another, wild with promises to white birds and bright red fish and beaches abandoned then longed for." "Coal, brass, cloth, wood-I never dreamed." - Snowman Snowman - Janet Frame
"Would I find La Maga?" "Wait till I finish my cigarette." Hopscotch - Julio Cortazar
"Fire and heat provide modes of explanation in the most varied domains, because they have been for us the occasion of unforgettable memories, for simple and decisive personal experiences." "What better proof can there be that fire, in the very precise sense of C.G. Jung, is the point of departure "for fertile archaic complex," and that a special psychoanalysis must destroy its painful ambiguities the better to set free the lively dialectics which bestow on reverie its true liberty and its true function as a creative mental process?" - The Psychoanalysis of Fire - Gaston Bachelard