: 27 March 2002 :

I've been sorting through my old notes and things, and I found the cardboard backing from a notepad that I'd torn all the pages out of to put in folders. On the back I'd written a load of little quotes and things. There are a few choice ones, some of which I've put up here:

Why did the chicken cross the road?
To die. In the rain.

– Ernest Hemingway (maybe)
________________________

Bagnoire à vendre, parfaite pour un petit chien.

what are French students doing in this loo?
having a piss

ho due biscotti
chi vuole uno?

– toilet graffiti highlights
________________________

“Women don’t know what they’re saying, that’s the whole difference between them and me.”

– Jacques Lacan
________________________

“ ‘Are you a woman?’ … ‘I ’ am not ‘I’, I am not, I am not one. As for woman, try and find out…”

– Luce Irigaray
________________________

“Sometimes I try to visualize Dr. Johnson or George Eliot confronting MTV Rap or experiencing Virtual Reality and find myself heartened by what I believe would be their ironical, strong refusal of such irrational entertainments.”

– Harold Bloom
________________________

“Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.”

– Molloy, Samuel Beckett
________________________

“And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldees’ excellency, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah… wild beasts of the desert shall lie there; and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there. And the wild beasts of the islands shall cry in their desolate houses, and dragons in their pleasant palaces.”

– Isaiah 13: 19–22
________________________

“The minor poets began gossiping about their careers as he sat there trying to take a shit. One of them had written 197 sonnets about a penguin he had once seen in a travelling circus. He sensed a Pulitzer Prize in this material.”

– “Homage to the San Francisco YMCA,” Richard Brautigan
________________________

“Eins within a space and a wearywide space it wast ere wohned a Mookse.”

– Finnegans Wake, James Joyce
________________________

“There’s a funeral, a funeral, it’s snowing
The egg is running around behind the coffin
What a joke
The devil is in the egg

My bad conscience spoils me
Then live without the egg
Reader madman
The egg was empty”

– Nezval