Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

from the waste books

Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don’t we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.

Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.

If countries were named after the words you first hear when you go there, England would have to be called Damn It.

The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.

We do not think good metaphors are anything very important, but I think that a good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on…

Denton Maurice Welch

from in youth is pleasure

Once in a field full of buttercups he had trodden in a cow-pat. He had looked down at his foot which had broken through the hardened outer crust. It lay in a trough lined with darkest richest green.

He saw that his brother’s friend’s face was covered with scars. It was a charming face, pale oatmeal colour, with glossy eyebrows; but the bone-white or pencil-blue lines wove a strange pattern on top of this creaminess. He seemed a gentle person, very masculine and dumb.

The man’s legs suddenly glinted like silk; the sun had caught the golden hairs, making the ordinary human legs look glossy and vigorous like those of a wild animal.

The soft pink pad at the end of the finger flushed as he pinched the flesh below.

Ben’s prestige suddenly appeared of an enormous and swollen importance to him. He must not endanger it any more. He must try to obliterate what had happened. With a gruesome clearness he saw that nothing changed. It was still necessary to behave in the ordinary way.

Errol Flynn - My Wicked, Wicked Ways

Setting: Bankrupt, Flynn is on his schooner, the Zaca, sailing around the Mediterranean to avoid paying bills.
Years before, I had begun drinking steadily, daily – about a fifth of vodka a day, maybe more. Now I extended and deepened this recreation. Why didn’t I tire of it? Why did most other things pall on me, but vodka never? Intermittently I played around with the celebrity set at the cosmopolitan centres, or one or two came to visit me on the Zaca. I had an occasional brawl in a bar – they were getting less frequent now – and generally I lived the life of a guy who is washed up.
I believed I was washed up, finished.
I had a little kit that I carried around. It was about the size of a medical kit. On it were the words FLYNN ENTERPRISES. Only I knew that inside of it was a tidy bar, with a bottle of vodka, two or three glasses and a bottle or two of quinine water. I had acquired a bible at last and I carted it around with me.

Worstward Ho:

Ooze back try worsen blanks. Those then when nohow on. Unsay then all gone. All not gone. Only nohow on. All not gone and nohow on. All there as now when somehow on. The dim. The void. The shades. Only words gone. Ooze gone. Till ooze again and on. Somehow ooze on.

Flaubert’s letters

from a July vacation in Vichy:
here the heat is one great fart-blast. Mercury plus humidity means sweat-through clothes; underwear wringing wet; trickle-trickle between ass-cheeks; underarms phew!; shoes hell on feet; skin scorched; air stifling, gasp making, murderous. Frantically oppressive; the only breeze the panting of human breasts; every bourgeois metamorphosed into a hot-air furnace … In short, the brain melts and animal spirits are disordered. I feel as flabby as a dog’s prick after coitus….

on going to Paris to take a break from writing:
Once there, I swear I’m going to go in for some monstrous debauches, to restore my morale. I’m longing for them. Perhaps by sticking something up my ass I can give my brain a good fucking.

on research for Salammbo:
The military art of the ancients makes my head swim; I’m stuffed with it; I vomit catapults, have hoisting machines up my ass, and piss scorpions.

on critics
What vanity, all Poetics, all works of criticism! The complacency of the gentlemen who produce such things flabbergasts me! Oh! nothing daunts those numbskulls!

Johnson

From a letter to James Boswell Saturday, 16 November 1776:
I had great pleasure in hearing that you are at last on good terms with your father. Life is but short; no time can be afforded but for the indulgence of real sorrow, or contests upon questions seriously momentous. Let us not throw away any of our days upon useless resentment, or contend who shall hold out longest in stubborn malignity. It is best not to be angry; and best, in the next place, to be quickly reconciled. May you and your father pass the remainder of your time in reciprocal benevolence!

Prayer on his 64th birthday:
Talisker in Skie, Sept. 24, 1773.

On last Saturday was my sixty fourth birthday. I might perhaps have forgotten it had not Boswel told me of it, and, what pleased me less, told the family at Dunvegan

The last year is added to those of which little use has been made. I tried in the summer to learn Dutch, and was interrupted by an inflammation in my eye. I set out in August on this Journey to Skie. I find my memory uncertain, but hope it is only by a life immethodical and scattered. Of my body I do not perceive that exercise, or change of air has yet either en- creased the strength or activity. My Nights are still disturbed by flatulencies.

My hope is, for resolution I dare no longer call it, to divide my time regularly, and to keep such a journal of my time, as may give me comfort in reviewing it. But when I consider my age, and the broken state of my body, I have great reason to fear lest Death should lay hold upon me, while I am yet only designing to live. But I have yet hope.

Almighty God, most merciful Father, look down upon me with pity ; Thou hast protected me in childhood and youth, support me, Lord, in my declining years. Preserve me from the dangers of sinful presumption. Give me, if it be best for me, stability of purposes, and tranquillity of mind. Let the year which I have now begun, be spent to thy glory, and to the furtherance of my salvation. Take not from me thy holy Spirit, but as Death approaches, prepare me to appear joyfully in thy presence for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

From Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D
We talked of change of manners. Dr Johnson observed, that our drinking less than our ancestors was owing to the change from ale to wine. ‘I remember,’ said he, ‘when all the DECENT people in Lichfield got drunk every night, and were not the worse thought of. Ale was cheap, so you pressed strongly. When a man must bring a bottle of wine, he is not in such haste. Smoking has gone out. To be sure, it is a shocking thing, blowing smoke out of our mouths into other people’s mouths, eyes, and noses, and having the same thing done to us. Yet I cannot account, why a thing which requires so little exertion, and yet preserves the mind from total vacuity, should have gone out. Every man has something by which he calms himself: beating with his feet, or so. [Footnote: Dr Johnson used to practice this himself very much.] I remember when people in England changed a shirt only once a week’