Uncomfortable conversation...

—Jason, "If You Steal," pg. ?

An alternative to raking leaves...

“We have sometimes wondered where the idea came from to powder the leaves with snake essence, but after some fruitless speculation we have eventually concluded that the origin of customs, especially when they are useful and successful, is lost in the mists of time. One fine day the city must have realized that its population was inadequate for the collection of each year's leaf fall and that only the intelligent utilization of the mongooses, which abound in the country, could overcome this deficiency. Some functionary from the town bordering the forests must have noticed that the mongooses, completely indifferent to dead leaves, would become ravenous for them if they smelled of snake. It must have taken a long time to reach this conclusion, to study the reaction of the mongooses to the dead leaves, to powder the leaves so that the mongooses would go after them with a vengeance.”


—“Around the Day in Eighty Worlds” by Julio Cortázar,  pg. 77

Cortázar does Fluxus...

   “THE SIMPLEST WAY TO DESTROY A CITY
   Hidden in the grass, wait for a large cumulus cloud to drift over the hated city. Then shoot a petrifying arrow; the cloud will turn to stone and the consequences go without saying.”

— “Around the Day in Eighty Worlds” by Julio Cortázar, pg. 7

Why paintings are different...

“And then why La Tour, who painted the same painting twice, had him hiding an Ace of Diamonds in the Louvre, and an Ace of Clubs in the Kimbell Museum. That's correct, isn't it Pierre? I'm not mistaken?”

I joined in his game. One always had to sniff out the humour in my uncle's words.

“But, Uncle Charles, it's so that the museum curators can tell which is which.”

—Philippe Beaussant, “Rendezvous In Venice,” pg. 64

Butt of the joke...

“And on the loftiest throne in the world we are still sitting only on our own rump."

—Michel Montaigne, quoted in Sarah Bakewell's “How to Live,” pg. 148

Sad woman...

“She tries harder, this twenty-eight-year-old woman, to remember what it is to be happy, and with alarm she realizes she no longer knows, that it's like a foreign language she learned in childhood but has now forgotten, remembering only that she knew it once. When was the last time I was happy?”

—“The Post-Office Girl” by Stefan Zweig,  pg. 19