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Louis Aragon

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Djuna Barnes, being forcibly fed, August 16, 1914.

Djuna Barnes Papers, Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries

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Carlos Fuentes

The time you will invent in order to survive, to create the illusion of a greater permanence on earth: the time your brain will create by perceiving that alternation of light and darkness on the clock face of dreams; by retaining those images of placidity threatened by the amassing of concentrated black clouds announcing a thunderclap, the posterity of lightning, the whirlwind discharge of rain, the certain appearance of a rainbow; by listening to the cyclical calls of animals in the forest; by screaming out the signs of time: the howl of wartime, the howl of mourning time, the howl of party time; finally, by saying time, speaking time, thinking the nonexistent time of a universe that knows no time because it never began and will never end: it had no beginning, will have no end, and does not know that you will invent a measure of infinity, a reserve of reason.

I gradually understood that, beyond a certain point, pain blots out the one thing that is essential to its being experienced—consciousness—and so perhaps extinguishes itself; we know very little about this. What is certain, though, is that mental suffering is effectively without end.

Elaine, as she was called, wore her hair shorn high up the nape, as the inmates of asylums do. Her facial expressions and movements gave a distraught impression, her lips were always wet, and she was invariably wearing her long grey apron that reached down to her ankles.

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lush-retina:

Clarice Lispector

Brian and I had coded our romance in camp images; we craved these images, grateful that they gave superficial expression to our deepest needs, because the story of our community is the story of doubt. We ironically befriended a past that had been generally despised.

I relinquished the firm barrier that separated us—no, that separated me from nothing.

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Renaud Monfourny, Paul Bowles