It's time for some quotes. Recently I found this beauty in an old notebook, a nicely effective quote from Perec's
Life: A User's Manual. And frankly, considering the amount of wasted waterpaint and lozenge-shaped rooms in that book, I think it nicely pithy and abrupt:
Life, young man, is a woman on her back, with swollen, close-set breasts, a smooth, soft, fat belly between portruding hips, with slender arms, plump thighs, and half-closed eyes, who in her grandiose and taunting provocation demands our most ardent fervour.
Only, put it in the voice of an Englishman.
The next, one of the better descriptions of
Paris, is from
Octavio Paz:
I was exploring the city that is probably the most beautiful example of the genius of our civilisation: solid without heaviness, huge without gigantism, tied to the earth but with a desire for flight... In its most auspicious moments — a square, an avenue, a group of buildings — tension turns to harmony, a pleasure for the eyes and for the mind.
(From In Light of India).
