Sebastian Knight was born on the thirty-first of December, 1899, in the former capital of my country. An old Russian lady who has for some obscure reason begged me not to divulge her name, happened to show me in Paris the diary she had kept in the past. So uneventful had those years been (apparently) that the collecting of daily details (which is always a poor method of self-preservation) barely surpassed a short description of the day’s weather; and it is curious to note in this respect that the personal diaries of sovereigns—no matter what troubles beset their realms—are mainly concerned with the same subject. Luck being what it is when left alone, here I was offered something which I might never have hunted down had it been a chosen quarry. Therefore I am able to state that the morning of Sebastian’s birth was a fine windless one, with twelve degrees (Reaumur) below zero … this is all, however, that the good lady found worth setting down. On second thought I cannot see any real necessity of complying with her anonymity. That she will ever read this book seems wildly improbable. Her name was and is Olga Olegovna Orlova—an egg-like alliteration which it would have been a pity to withhold.

Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

‘How shrewd you are!’ she exclaimed with admiration. ‘You’re a psychoanalyst.’

‘One doesn’t have to be a psychoanalyst to make psychological observations,’ said Moragas, galled. He had a horror of psychoanalysis, because he was right-wing. And he was right-wing because he was in business; if he had been in nothing, like Celestino, he might have been an anarchist, like Celestino.

He went on:

‘Psychoanalysis is psychology pure and simple, when it’s carried out by someone who isn’t intelligent, or who’s a bit corrupt. Three years ago I knocked my head against the door leading up from my cellar. Immediately I had brain trouble. So it was nothing to do with psychoanalysis. I was given the name of a famous neurologist, and I found myself — there was some misunderstanding — in the hands of a psychiatrist. The questions he asked were so irrelevant (no connection whatsoever with my case) and so preposterous that I realized at once that I was dealing with a sick man. I felt sorry for him. I answered his questions in a way that I thought would soothe and console him. I hope I did him some good.’

Henry de Montherlant, Chaos and Night

The pleasure in this world, it has been said, outweighs the pain; or, at any rate, there is an even balance between the two. If the reader wishes to see shortly whether this statement is true, let him compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is engaged in eating the other.

Arthur Schopenhauer, “On the Sufferings of the World”

A few years earlier, I’d awoken in a room in a country inn to discover that our thoughts are produced in a region of our innermost being marked by the quality of silence. Even amid a great city’s most strident clamor we think in silence about where we’re going or what we have to do, or whatever it is that corresponds to our desires. And the silence in which our feelings take shape is still deeper. We feel love in silence, before the thoughts come, and then the words, and then the acts, always moving farther towards the outside, towards the noise. Some thoughts can hide within silence and never become words, though they may carry out hidden acts. But there are also feelings that hide in silence behind deceptive thoughts. The silence where feelings and thoughts are formed is the place where the style of a human being’s life and life work is formed.

Felisberto Hernández, “The New House”

According to List (who in his day traveled to Europe too), they had laid a trap for mi general for political reasons, which was the exact opposite of what the newspapers said, the press inclining toward a brothel skirmish or a crime of passion with Rosario Contreras in a leading role. According to List, who was personally familiar with the brothel, mi general liked to screw in the most out-of-the-way room, which wasn’t very big but had the advantage of being at the back of the house, far from the noise, near this courtyard where there was a fountain. And after screwing, mi general liked to go out into the courtyard to smoke a cigarette and think about postcoital sadness, that vexing sadness of the flesh, and about all the books he hadn’t read.

Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives