My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom imaginable, freedom from violence and lies, no matter what form the latter two take.

—Anton Chekhov, letter to A. N. Plescheev

I know that she has seen many bad things, the ascension of the devil, the unstoppable procession of termites climbing the Tree of Life, the conflict between the Enlightenment and the Shadow or the Empire or the Kingdom of Order, which are all proper names for the irrational stain that is bent on turning us into beasts or robots, and which has been fighting the Enlightenment since the beginning of time (a conjecture of mine, which the official representatives of the Enlightenment would no doubt reject)…

—Roberto Bolaño, Amulet

The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where another, unforeseen reading is always possible.

—J. M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year

We die. That may be the meaning of our lives. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

—Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture

The present author is no philosopher, he has not understood the System, nor does he know if there really is one, or if it has been completed. [...] The present author is no philosopher, he is poetice et eleganter [to put it in poetic and well-chosen terms], a freelancer who neither writes the System nor makes any promises about it, who pledges neither anything about the System nor himself to it. He writes because doing so is a luxury, the more agreeable and conspicuous the fewer who buy and read what he writes. In an age where passion has been done away with for the sake of science he easily foresees his fate—in an age when an author who wants readers must be careful to write in a way that he can be comfortably leafed through during the after-dinner nap… He foresees his fate will be to be completely ignored…

—Johannes de silentio