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The Power Of A Text When It Is Read Is Different From The Power It Has When It Is Copied Out. Only The Copied Text Thus Commands The Soul Of Him Who Is Occupied With It, Whereas The Mere Reader Never Discovers The New Aspects Of His Inner Self That Are Opened By The Text, That Road Cut Through The Interior Jungle Forever Closing Behind It: Because The Reader Follows The Movement Of His Mind In The Free Flight Of Day-dreaming, Whereas The Copier Submits It To Command.

-Walter Benjamin

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The Power Of A

Walter Benjamin

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The Power Of A Text When It Is Read Is Different From The Power It Has When It Is Copied Out. Only The Copied Text Thus Commands The Soul Of Him Who Is Occupied With It, Whereas The Mere Reader Never Discovers The New Aspects Of His Inner Self That Are Opened By The Text, That Road Cut Through The Interior Jungle Forever Closing Behind It: Because The Reader Follows The Movement Of His Mind In The Free Flight Of Day-dreaming, Whereas The Copier Submits It To Command.

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Painting, By Its Nature, Cannot Provide An Object Of Simultaneous Collective Reception... As Film Is Able To Do Today... And While Efforts Have Been Made To Present Paintings To The Masses In Galleries And Salons, This Mode Of Reception Gives The Masses No Means Of Organizing And Regulating Their Response. Thus, The Same Public Which Reacts Progressively To A Slapstick Comedy Inevitably Displays A Backward Attitude Toward Surrealism.

Work On A Good Piece Of Writing Proceeds On Three Levels: A Musical One, Where It Is Composed, An Architectural One, Where It Is Constructed, And Finally A Textile One, Where It Is Woven.

For What Is The Program Of The Bourgeois Parties? A Bad Poem On Springtime, Filled To Bursting With Metaphors.

[photography] Has Become More And More Subtle, More And More Modern, And The Result Is That It Is Now Incapable Of Photographing A Tenement Or A Rubbish Heap Without Transfiguring It. Not To Mention A River Dam Or Electric Cable Factory: In Front Of These, Photography Can Now Only Say, How Beautiful!

The Good Tidings Which The Historian Of The Past Brings With Throbbing Heart May Be Lost In A Void The Very Moment He Opens His Mouth.

Language Has Unmistakably Made Plain That Memory Is Not An Instrument For Exploring The Past But Its Theater. It Is The Medium Of Past Experience, Just As The Earth Is The Medium In Which Dead Cities Lie Buried.

All Human Knowledge Takes The Form Of Interpretation.

He Who Observes Etiquette But Objects To Lying Is Like Someone Who Dresses Fashionably But Wears No Vest.

The Destructive Character Knows Only One Watchword: Make Room. And Only One Activity: Clearing Away. The Destructive Character Is Young And Cheerful. For Destroying Rejuvenates, Because It Clears Away The Traces Of Our Own Age; It Cheers, Because Everything Cleared Away Means To The Destroyer A Complete Reduction, Indeed A Rooting Out, Of His Own Condition.

For Me, It Was Like This: Pronounced Antipathy To Conversing About Matters Of Practical Life, The Future, Dates, Politics. You Are Fixated On The Intellectual Sphere As A Man Possessed May Be Fixated On The Sexual: Under Its Spell, Sucked Into It.

Having A Clear Faith, Based On The Creed Of The Church Is Often Labeled Today As Fundamentalism. Whereas Relativism, Which Is Letting Oneself Be Tossed And Of All The Ways Of Acquiring Books, Writing Them Oneself Is Regarded As The Most Praiseworthy Method. Writers Are Really People Who Write Books Not Because They Are Poor, But Because They Are Dissatisfied With The Books Which They Could Buy But Do Not Like.

History Breaks Down Into Images, Not Into Stories.

Not To Find One’s Way Around A City Does Not Mean Much. But To Lose One’s Way In A City, As One Loses One’s Way In A Forest, Requires Some Schooling.

Quotations In My Work Are Like Wayside Robbers Who Leap Out Armed And Relieve The Stroller Of His Conviction.

Ownership Is The Most Intimate Relationship That One Can Have To Objects. Not That They Come Alive In Him; It Is He Who Lives In Them.

Intimate Relationships

Only He Who Can View His Own Past As An Abortion Sprung From Compulsion And Need Can Use It To Full Advantage In The Present.

For Every Second Of Time Was The Strait Gate Through Which The Messiah Might Enter.

Every Passion Borders On The Chaotic, But The Collector's Passion Borders On The Chaos Of Memories.

Thinking Involves Not Only The Flow Of Thoughts, But Their Arrest As Well.

Capitalism Is A Purely Cultic Religion, Perhaps The Most Extreme That Ever Existed.

Never Stop Writing Because You Have Run Out Of Ideas. Fill The Lacunae Of Inspiration By Tidily Copying Out What Is Already Written.

In Every Case The Storyteller Is A Man Who Has Counsel For His Readers.

The Crowd Is The Veil Through Which The Familiar City Beckons To The Flâneur As Phantasmagoria-now A Landscape, Now A Room.

It Is Only For Those Without Hope That Hope Is Given.

There Was The Pedestrian Who Wedged Himself Into The Crowd, But There Was Also The Flneur Who Demanded Elbow Room And Was Unwilling To Forego The Life Of The Gentleman Of Leisure. His Leisurely Appearance As A Personality Is His Protest Against The Division Of Labour Which Makes People Into Specialists. It Was Also His Protest Against Their Industriousness. Around 1840 It Was Briefly Fashionable To Take Turtles For A Walk In The Arcades. The Flneurs Liked To Have The Turtles Set The Pace For Them.

Each Morning The Day Lies Like A Fresh Shirt On Our Bed; This Incomparably Fine, Incomparably Tightly Woven Tissue Of Pure Prediction Fits Us Perfectly. The Happiness Of The Next Twenty-four Hours Depends On Our Ability, On Waking, To Pick It Up.

The Present, Which, As A Model Of Messianic Time, Comprises The Entire History Of Mankind In An Enormous Abridgment, Coincides With The Stature Which The History Of Mankind Has In The Universe.

Let No Thought Pass Incognito, And Keep Your Notebook As Strictly As The Authorities Keep Their Register Of Aliens.

Reminiscences, Even Extensive Ones, Do Not Always Amount To An Autobiography. For Autobiography Has To Do With Time, With Sequence And What Makes Up The Continuous Flow Of Life. Here, I Am Talking Of A Space, Of Moments And Discontinuities. For Even If Months And Years Appear Here, It Is In The Form They Have At The Moment Of Commemoration.

We Collect Books In The Belief That We Are Preserving Them When In Fact It Is The Books That Preserve Their Collector.

This Is How One Pictures The Angel Of History. His Face Is Turned Toward The Past. Where We Perceived A Chain Of Events, He Sees One Single Catastrophe Which Keeps Piling Wreckage And Hurls It In Front Of His Feet. The Angel Would Like To Stay, Awaken The Dead, And Make Whole What Has Been Smashed. But A Storm Is Blowing From Paradise; It Has Got Caught In His Wings With Such Violence That The Angel Can No Longer Close Them. This Storm Irresistably Propels Him Into The Future To Which His Back Is Turned, While The Pile Of Debris Before Him Grows Skyward. The Storm Is What We Call Progress.

How Many Cities Have Revealed Themselves To Me In The Marches I Undertook In The Pursuit Of Books!

Only For The Sake Of The Hopeless Ones Have We Been Given Hope.

... [l]ess Than At Any Time Does A Simple Reproduction Of Reality Tell Us Anything About Reality. A Photograph Of The Krupp Works Or Gec Yields Almost Nothing About Those Institutions. Reality Proper Has Slipped Into The Functional. The Reification Of Human Relationships, The Factory, Let's Say, No Longer Reveals These Relationships. Therefore Something Has To Be Constructed, Something Artificial, Something Set Up.

The Distracted Person, Too, Can Form Habits.

To A Book Collector, You See, The True Freedom Of All Books Is Somewhere On His Shelves.

Counsel Woven Into The Fabric Of Real Life Is Wisdom.

The Art Of The Critic In A Nutshell: To Coin Slogans Without Betraying Ideas. The Slogans Of An Inadequate Criticism Peddle Ideas To Fashion.

As Long As There Is Still One Beggar Around, There Will Still Be Myth.

Death Is The Sanction Of Everything That The Storyteller Can Tell. He Has Borrowed His Authority From Death.

Books, Too, Begin Like The Week – With A Day Of Rest In Memory Of Their Creation. The Preface Is Their Sunday.

Rather Than Ask, What Is The Attitude Of A Work To The Relations Of Production Of Its Time? I Should Like To Ask, What Is Its Position In Them.

Taking Food Alone Tends To Make One Hard And Coarse. Those Accustomed To It Must Lead A Spartan Life If They Are Not To Go Downhill. Hermits Have Observed, If For Only This Reason, A Frugal Diet. For It Is Only In Company That Eating Is Done Justice; Food Must Be Divided And Distributed If It Is To Be Well Received.

You Could Tell A Lot About A Man By The Books He Keeps - His Tastes, His Interest, His Habits.

Any Translation Which Intends To Perform A Transmitting Function Cannot Transmit Anything But Information-hence, Something Inessential. This Is The Hallmark Of Bad Translations.

All The Decisive Blows Are Struck Left-handed.

The Destructive Character Lives From The Feeling, Not That Life Is Worth Living, But That Suicide Is Not Worth The Trouble.

Books And Harlots Have Their Quarrels In Public.

Allegories Are, In The Realm Of Thought, What Ruins Are In The Realm Of Things.

He Who Asks Fortune-tellers The Future Unwittingly Forfeits An Inner Intimation Of Coming Events That Is A Thousand Times More Exact Than Anything They May Say. He Is Impelled By Inertia, Rather Than Curiosity, And Nothing Is More Unlike The Submissive Apathy With Which He Hears His Fate Revealed Than The Alert Dexterity With Which The Man Of Courage Lays Hands On The Future.

The Fairy Tale, Which To This Day Is The First Tutor Of Children Because It Was Once The First Tutor Of Mankind, Secretly Lives On In The Story. The First True Storyteller Is, And Will Continue To Be, The Teller Of Fairy Tales. Whenever Good Counsel Was At A Premium, The Fairy Tale Had It, And Where The Need Was Greatest, Its Aid Was Nearest. This Need Was Created By Myth. The Fairy Tale Tells Us Of The Earliest Arrangements That Mankind Made To Shake Off The Nightmare Which Myth Had Placed Upon Its Chest.

By Close-ups Of The Things Around Us, By Focusing On Hidden Details Of Familiar Objects, By Exploring Commonplace Milieus Under The Ingenious Guidance Of The Camera, The Film, On The One Hand, Extends Our Comprehension Of The Necessities Which Rule Our Lives; On The Other Hand, It Manages To Assure Us Of An Immense And Unexpected Field Of Action.

Never Stop Writing Because You Have Run Out Of Ideas.

I Came Into The World Under The Sign Of Saturn -- The Star Of The Slowest Revolution, The Planet Of Detours And Delays.

The Camera Introduces Us To Unconscious Optics As Does Psychoanalysis To Unconscious Impulses.

Gifts Must Affect The Receiver To The Point Of Shock.

Bourgeois Existence Is The Regime Of Private Affairs . . . And The Family Is The Rotten, Dismal Edifice In Whose Closets And Crannies The Most Ignominious Instincts Are Deposited. Mundane Life Proclaims The Total Subjugation Of Eroticism To Privacy.

What Has Been Forgotten Is Never Something Purely Individual. Everything Forgotten Mingles With What Has Been Forgotten Of The Prehistoric World, Forms Countless, Uncertain, Changing Compounds, Yielding A Constant Flow Of New, Strange Products.

I Would Like To Metamorphose Into A Mouse-mountain.

The Tradition Of The Oppressed Teaches Us That The "state Of Emergency" In Which We Live Is Not The Exception But The Rule.

It Is Precisely The Purpose Of The Public Opinion Generated By The Press To Make The Public Incapable Of Judging, To Insinuate Into It The Attitude Of Someone Irresponsible, Uninformed.

All Disgust Is Originally Disgust At Touching.

Art Teaches Us To See Into Things. Folk Art And Kitsch Allow Us To See Outward From Within Things.

The Work Of Memory Collapses Time.

The Illiterate Of The Future Will Not Be The Man Who Cannot Read The Alphabet, But The One Who Cannot Take A Photograph.

All Religions Have Honored The Beggar. For He Proves That In A Matter At The Same Time As Prosaic And Holy, Banal And Regenerative As The Giving Of Alms, Intellect And Morality, Consistency And Principles Are Miserably Inadequate.

Work On Good Prose Has Three Steps: A Musical Stage When It Is Composed, An Architectonic One When It Is Built, And A Textile One When It Is Woven.

Like Ultraviolet Rays Memory Shows To Each Man In The Book Of Life A Script That Invisibly And Prophetically Glosses The Text.

Mechanical Reproduction Emancipates The Work Of Art From Its Parasitical Dependence On Ritual.

These Are Days When No One Should Rely Unduly On His Competence. Strength Lies In Improvisation. All The Decisive Blows Are Struck Left-handed.

The Construction Of Life Is At Present In The Power Of Facts Far More Than Convictions.

Those Who Do Not Learn How To Decipher Photographs Will Be The Illiterate Of The Future.

The Adjustment Of Reality To The Masses And Of The Masses To Reality Is A Process Of Unlimited Scope, As Much For Thinking As For Perception.

To Perceive The Aura Of An Object We Look At Means To Invest It With The Ability To Look At Us In Return.

We Have Long Forgotten The Ritual By Which The House Of Our Life Was Erected. But When It Is Under Assault And Enemy Bombs Are Already Taking Their Toll, What Enervated, Perverse Antiquities Do They Not Lay Bare In The Foundations.

Writers Are Really People Who Write Books Not Because They Are Poor, But Because They Are Dissatisfied With The Books Which They Could Buy But Do Not Like.

If Mythic Violence Is Lawmaking, Divine Violence Is Law-destroying; If The Former Sets Boundaries, The Latter Boundlessly Destroys Them; If Mythic Violence Brings At Once Guilt And Retribution, Divine Power Only Expiates; If The Former Threatens, The Latter Strikes; If The Former Is Bloody, The Latter Is Lethal Without Spilling Blood

He Who Asks Fortune-tellers The Future Unwittingly Forfeits An Inner Intimation Of Coming Events That Is A Thousand Times More Exact Than Anything They May Say.

Marx Says That Revolutions Are The Locomotives Of World History. But The Situation May Be Quite Different. Perhaps Revolutions Are Not The Train Ride, But The Human Race Grabbing For The Emergency Brake.

The Only Way Of Knowing A Person Is To Love Them Without Hope.

The Idea That Happiness Could Have A Share In Beauty Would Be Too Much Of A Good Thing.

Of All The Ways Of Acquiring Books, Writing Them Oneself Is Regarded As The Most Praiseworthy Method.

Opinions Are To The Vast Apparatus Of Social Existence What Oil Is To Machines: One Does Not Go Up To A Turbine And Pour Machine Oil Over It; One Applies A Little To Hidden Spindles And Joints That One Has To Know.

In The Convulsions Of The Commodity Economy, We Begin To Recognize The Monuments Of The Bourgeoisie As Ruins Even Before They Have Crumbled.

All Efforts To Render Politics Aesthetic Culminate In One Thing: War.

Every Monument Of Civilization Is A Monument Of Barbarism

We Do Not Always Proclaim Loudly The Most Important Thing We Have To Say. Nor Do We Always Privately Share It With Those Closest To Us, Our Intimate Friends, Those Who Have Been Most Devotedly Ready To Receive Our Confession.

To Do Justice To The Figure Of Kafka In Its Purity And Its Peculiar Beauty One Must Never Lose Sight Of One Thing: It Is The Purity And Beauty Of A Failure.

The Greater The Decrease In The Social Significance Of An Art Form, The Sharper The Distinction Between Criticism And Enjoyment By The Public. The Conventional Is Uncritically Enjoyed, And The Truly New Is Criticized With Aversion.

Less And Less Frequently Do We Encounter People With The Ability To Tell A Tale Properly. More And More Often There Is Embarrassment All Around When The Wish To Hear A Story Is Expressed. It Is As If Something That Seemed Inalienable To Us, The Securest Among Our Possessions, Were Taken From Us: The Ability To Exchange Our Experiences...experience Has Fallen In Value. And It Looks As If It Is Continuing To Fall Into Bottomlessness.

The Nourishing Fruit Of The Historically Understood Contains Time As A Precious But Tasteless Seed.

Melancholy Betrays The World For The Sake Of Knowledge. But In Its Tenacious Self-absorption It Embraces Dead Objects In Its Contemplation, In Order To Redeem Them

In The World's Structure Dream Loosens Individuality Like A Bad Tooth.

The Book Borrower...proves Himself To Be An Inveterate Collector Of Books Not So Much By The Fervor With Which He Guards His Borrowed Treasures...as By His Failure To Read These Books.

Experience Has Taught Me That The Shallowest Of Communist Platitudes Contains More Of A Hierarchy Of Meaning Than Contemporary Bourgeois Profundity.

As Hegel Put It, Only When It Is Dark Does The Owl Of Minerva Begin Its Flight. Only In Extinction Is The Collector Comprehend.

For Only That Which We Knew And Practiced At Age 15 Will One Day Constitute Our Attraction. And One Thing, Therefore, Can Never Be Made Good: Having Neglected To Run Away From Home.

The Concept Of Progress Must Be Grounded In The Idea Of Catastrophe. That Things Are 'status Quo' Is The Catastrophe

I Am Unpacking My Library. Yes I Am. The Books Are Not Yet On The Shelves, Not Yet Touched By The Mild Boredom Of Order.

Literature Tells Very Little To Those Who Understand It.

You Follow The Same Paths Of Thought As Before. Only, They Appear Strewn With Roses.

The Killing Of A Criminal Can Be Moral-but Never Its Legitimation.

Only He Who Can View His Own Past As An Abortion Sprung From Compulsion And Need Can Use It To Full Advantage In The Present. For What One Has Lived Is At Best Comparable To A Beautiful Statue Which Has Had All Its Limbs Knocked Off In Transit, And Now Yields Nothing But The Precious Block Out Of Which The Image Of One's Future Must Be Hewn.

The True Picture Of The Past Flits By. The Past Can Be Seized Only As An Image Which Flashes Up At The Instant When It Can Be Recognized And Is Never Seen Again.

In Other Words, The Unique Value Of The "authentic" Work Of Art Has Its Basis In Ritual, The Location Of Its Original Use Value. This Ritualistic Basis, However Remote, Is Still Recognizable As Secularized Ritual Even In The Most Profane Forms Of The Cult Of Beauty.

During Long Periods Of History, The Mode Of Human Sense Perception Changes With Humanity’s Entire Mode Of Existence. The Manner In Which Human Sense Perception Is Organized, The Medium In Which It Is Accomplished, Is Determined Not Only By Nature But By Historical Circumstances As Well

Even The Most Perfect Reproduction Of A Work Of Art Is Lacking In One Element: Its Presence In Time And Space, Its Unique Existence At The Place Where It Happens To Be.

In The Fields With Which We Are Concerned, Knowledge Comes Only In Flashes. The Text Is The Thunder Rolling Long Afterward.

Kitsch Offers Instantaneous Emotional Gratification Without Intellectual Effort, Without The Requirement Of Distance, Wihtout Sublimation.

What We Must Demand From The Photographer Is The Ability To Put Such A Caption Beneath His Picture As Will Rescue It From The Ravages Of Modishness And Confer Upon It A Revolutionary Use Value.

True Translation Is Transparent: It Does Not Obscure The Original, Does Not Stand In Its Light, But Rather Allows Pure Language, As If Strengthened By Its Own Medium, To Shine Even More Fully On The Original.

The Experience Of Our Generation: That Capitalism Will Not Die A Natural Death.

A Bearer Of News Of Death Appears To Himself As Very Important. His Feeling - Even Against All Reason - Makes Him A Messenger From The Realm Of The Dead.

A Blind Determination To Save The Prestige Of Personal Existence, Rather Than, Through An Impartial Disdain For Its Impotence And Entanglement, At Least To Detach It From The Background Of Universal Delusion, Is Triumphing Almost Everywhere.

Man Is The Namer; By This We Recognize That Through Him Pure Language Speaks. All Nature, Insofar As It Communicates Itself, Communicates Itself In Language, And So Finally In Man. Hence, He Is The Lord Of Nature And Can Give Names To Things. Only Through The Linguistic Being Of Things Can He Get Beyond Himself And Attain Knowledge Of Them-in The Name. God's Creation Is Completed When Things Receive Their Names From Man, From Whom In Name Language Alone Speaks.

All Great Works Of Literature Either Dissolve A Genre Or Invent One.

Living Substance Conquers The Frenzy Of Destruction Only In The Ecstasy Of Procreation.

To Be Happy Is To Be Able To Become Aware Of Oneself Without Fright.

Not To Find One's Way In A City May Well Be Uninteresting And Banal. It Requires Ignorance - Nothing More. But To Lose Oneself In A City - As One Loses Oneself In A Forest - That Calls For A Quite Different Schooling. Then, Signboard And Street Names, Passers-by, Roofs, Kiosks, Or Bars Must Speak To The Wanderer Like A Cracking Twig Under His Feet In The Forest.

If Sleep Is The Apogee Of Physical Relaxation, Boredom Is The Apogee Of Mental Relaxation. Boredom Is The Dream Bird That Hatches The Egg Of Experience.

No Poem Is Intended For The Reader, No Picture For The Beholder, No Symphony For The Listener.

He Who Seeks To Approach His Own Buried Past Must Conduct Himself Like A Man Digging... This Confers The Tone And Bearing Of Genuine Reminiscences. He Must Not Be Afraid To Return Again And Again To The Same Matter; To Scatter It As One Scatters Earth, To Turn It Over As One Turns Over Soil.

Boredom Is The Dream Bird That Hatches The Egg Of Experience. A Rustling In The Leaves Drives Him Away.

It Is In A Small Village In The Pyrenees Where No One Knows Me 7that My Life Will Come To A Close.... There Is Not Enough Time Remaining For Me To Write All The Letters I Would Like To Write.

To The Lover The Loved One Always Appears As Solitary.

Opinions Are A Private Matter. The Public Has An Interest Only In Judgments.

Genuine Polemics Approach A Book As Lovingly As A Cannibal Spices A Baby.

To Articulate The Past Historically Does Not Mean To Recognize It "the Way It Really Was"...it Means To Seize Hold Of A Memory As It Flashes Up At A Moment Of Danger.

The Power Of A Text When It Is Read Is Different From The Power It Has When It Is Copied Out. Only The Copied Text Thus Commands The Soul Of Him Who Is Occupied With It, Whereas The Mere Reader Never Discovers The New Aspects Of His Inner Self That Are Opened By The Text, That Road Cut Through The Interior Jungle Forever Closing Behind It: Because The Reader Follows The Movement Of His Mind In The Free Flight Of Day-dreaming, Whereas The Copier Submits It To Command.

There Is No Document Of Civilization Which Is Not At The Same Time A Document Of Barbarism.

Ideas Are To Objects As Constellations Are To Stars [translated From Trauerspiel, 1928].

The Art Of Storytelling Is Reaching Its End Because The Epic Side Of Truth, Wisdom, Is Dying Out.

It Is The Task Of The Translator To Release In His Own Language That Pure Language That Is Under The Spell Of Another, To Liberate The Language Imprisoned In A Work In His Re-creation Of That Work.

Things Are Only Mannequins And Even The Great World-historical Events Are Only Costumes Beneath Which They Exchange Glances With Nothingness.

Our Image Of Happiness Is Indissolubly Bound Up With The Image Of The Past.

Every Image Of The Past That Is Not Recognised By The Present As One Of Its Own Threatens To Disappear Irretrievably.

The Messiah Comes Not Only As The Redeemer, He Comes As The Subduer Of Antichrist. Only That Historian Will Have The Gift Of Fanning The Spark Of Hope In The Past Who Is Firmly Convinced That Even The Dead Will Not Be Safe From The Enemy If He Wins. And This Enemy Has Not Ceased To Be Victorious.

The Film Is The First Art Form Capable Of Demonstrating How Matter Plays Tricks On Man.

Nothing Is Poorer Than A Truth Expressed As It Was Thought. Committed To Writing In Such Cases, It Is Not Even A Bad Photograph. Truth Wants To Be Startled Abruptly, At One Stroke, From Her Self-immersion, Whether By Uproar, Music Or Cries For Help.

There Is No Muse Of Philosophy, Nor Is There One Of Translation.

The More Circumspectly You Delay Writing Down An Idea, The More Maturely Developed It Will Be On Surrendering Itself.

Not To Find One's Way Around A City Does Not Mean Much. But To Lose One's Way In A City, As One Loses One's Way In A Forest, Requires Some Schooling. Street Names Must Speak To The Urban Wanderer Like The Snapping Of Dry Twigs, And Little Streets In The Heart Of The City Must Reflect The Times Of Day, For Him, As Clearly As A Mountain Valley. This Art I Acquired Rather Late In Life; It Fulfilled A Dream, Of Which The First Traces Were Labyrinths On The Blotting Papers In My School Notebooks.

Uncleanness Is So Much The Attribute Of Officials That One Could Almost Regard Them As Enormous Parasites...in The Same Way The Fathers In Kafka's Strange Families Batten On Their Sons, Lying On Top Of Them Like Giant Parasites. They Not Only Prey Upon Their Strength, But Gnaw Away At The Sons' Right To Exist. The Fathers Punish, But They Are At The Same Time The Accusers. The Sin Of Which They Accuse Their Sons Seems To Be A Kind Of Original Sin.

In The End, We Get Older, We Kill Everyone Who Loves Us Through The Worries We Give Them, Through The Troubled Tenderness We Inspire In Them, And The Fears We Ceaselessly Cause.

Any Order Is A Balancing Act Of Extreme Precariousness.

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