Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus page 180

In a work there is much seeming and sham, one could go further and say that as "a work" it is seeming in and for itself. Its ambition is to make one believe that it is not made, but born, like Pallas Athene in full fig and embossed armour from Jupiter's head. But that is a delusion. Never did a work come like that. It is work: art-work for appearance's sake--and now the question is whether at the present stage of our consciousness, our knowledge, our sense of truth, this little game is still permissible, still intellectually possible, still to be taken seriously; whether the work as such, the construction, self-sufficing, harmonically complete in itself, still stands in any legitimate relation to the complete insecurity, problematic conditions, and lack of harmony of our social situation; whether all seeming, even the most beautiful, even precisely the beautiful, has not become a lie.

Joanna Russ, Introduction to "Letter to Susan Koppelman", in To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction page 171

Anyone who seriously tries to make received ideas do feminist work will find that the received ideas end up making her feminism do their work, and anyone who really thinks that respectability will do us good in any field--well, I don't know what to say. I am not against people lying their heads off when they have to, to make a living, but believing the junk you may be forced to practice is another matter.

Joanna Russ, "Author's Introduction" to To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction, page xv

If any theme runs through all my work, it is what Adrienne Rich once called "re-vision," i.e. the re-perceiving of experience, not because our experience is complex or subtle or hard to understand (though it is sometimes all three) but because so much of what's presented to us as "the real world" or "the way it is" is so obviously untrue that a great deal of social energy must be mobilized to hide that gross and ghastly fact.

Shirley Jackson, The Sundial pages 185-187

"I'm only seventeen years old," Gloria said, "and I know this much--that world out there, Fancy, that world which is all around on the other side of the wall, it isn't real. It's real inside here, we're real, but what is outside is like it's made of cardboard, or plastic, or something. Nothing out there is real. Everything is made out of something else, and it all comes apart in your hands. The people aren't real, they're nothing but endless copies of each other, all looking just alike, like paper dolls, and they live in houses full of artificial things and eat imitation food--"

"My doll house," Fancy said, amused.

"Your dolls have little cakes and roasts made of wood and painted. Well, the people out there have cakes and bread and cookies made out of pretend flour, with all kinds of things taken out of it to make it prettier for them to eat, and all kinds of things put in to make it easier for them to eat, and they eat meat which has been cooked for them already so they won't have to bother doing anything except heat it up and they read newspapers full of nonsense and lies and one day they hear that some truth is being kept from them for their own good and the next day they hear that the truth is being kept from them because it was really a lie and the next day they hear--"

Fancy laughed. "You sound like you hate everything."

"I wouldn't like being a doll in a doll house, I can tell you. I'm only seventeen years old, but I've learned a lot. All those people out there know about things like love and tenderness is what they hear in songs or read in books--that's one reason I'm glad we burned all the books here. People shouldn't be able to read them and remember nothing but lies. And you talk about dances and parties--I can tell you there's no heart to anything any more; when you dance with a boy he's only looking over your shoulder at some other boy, and the only real people left any more are the shadows on the television screens."

"If I believed you," Fancy said, "I would still mind never trying things for myself. But I won't ever believe you until I've gone out there and seen it."

"There's nothing there," Gloria said with finality. "It's a make-believe world, with nothing in it but cardboard and trouble." She thought for a minute, and then said, "If you were a liar, or a pervert, or a thief, or even just sick, there wouldn't be anything out there you couldn't have.

Fancy bent over the doll house. "Anyway," she said, "I don't care how shabby it is. I'm not afraid of bad people, and of not being safe."

"But there aren't any good people," Gloria said helplessly. "No one is anything but tired and ugly and mean. I know."

Gabriel Josipovici, What Ever Happened to Modernism? page 153

This is more like the kind of play we are used to. Not just because seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dramatists and opera librettists turned more often to Euripides than to the other two, but because it's more like the kind of drama we see coming out of Hollywood and on our television screens every night. How exactly does it differ from Aeschylus and Sophocles? First of all, there is no longer any need for the mask. Indeed, masking is a positive hindrance, since so much in these plays turns on the contrast between appearance and reality, or on the nuances of doubt and uncertainty. [John] Jones puts it this way: Sophoclean privacy has been replaced by Euripidean inwardness, which gives us our modern category of the subjective. 'When Orestes saw the Furies in the Oresteia', he says, 'he was not experiencing an hallucination: he was polluted. But when the Euripidean Orestes thought he saw the Furies (Orestes, 408), he knew that his guilty 'conscience' (396) lay at the back of the apparition. At the same time Euripides' new interest in human beings and his new fascination with plot brings with it a failing confidence in praxis, action. This is what Kierkegaard was after when he said: 'In ancient tragedy the action itself has an epic moment in it; it is as much event as action.' What he meant was that in the Agamemnon or the Oedipus at Colonus we witness essentially a single event: the return home and murder of Agamemnon; the arrival at Colonus and going to his death of Oedipus. It unfolds slowly before us, each moment having the same weight as every other; when the event has been explored from all sides, as it were, the play is over, leaving us with that double experience of pity and sorrow, calmness and joy, which Kierkegaard and Jones explore so well. In Iphegeneia in Tauris, on the other hand, as in most of Euripides, as in the modern drama against which Jarry, Brecht, Beckett and Ionesco were reacting, we witness the author's manipulation of plot to create exciting theatre, driving towards its (surprising and often unexpected) conclusion. 'Clearly defined terminal climax, so impressively absent in the older drama', concludes Jones, 'becomes a felt need in Euripides.'

Gabriel Josipovici, What Ever Happened to Modernism? page 73

[This] helps explain why so many Modernist writers have been at pains to stress that their fictions are only fictions, not reality. Not in order to play games with the reader or to deny the reality of the world, as uncomprehending critics charge them, but, on the contrary, out of a profound sense that they will only be able to speak the truth about the world if the bad faith of the novel, its inevitable production of plot and meaning, is acknowledged and, somehow, 'placed'.

Etienne de la Boétie, The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude page 19

They didn't even neglect, these Roman emperors, to assume generally the title of Tribune of the People, partly because this office was held sacred and inviolable and also because it had been founded for the defense and protection of the people and enjoyed the favor of the state. By this means they made sure that the populace would trust them completely, as if they merely used the title and did not abuse it. Today there are some who do not behave very differently; they never undertake an unjust policy, even one of some importance, without prefacing it with some pretty speech concerning public welfare and common good.

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow page 41

Once Roger and Jessica might have stopped. But they're both alumni of the Battle of Britain, both have been drafted into the early black mornings and the crying for mercy, the dumb inertia of cobbles and beams, the profound shortage of mercy in those days. . . . By the time one has pulled one's nth victim or part of a victim free of one's nth pile of rubble, he told her once, angry, weary, it has ceased to be that personal . . . the value of n may be different for each of us, but I'm sorry: sooner or later . . .

And past the exhaustion with it there is also this. If they have not quite seceded from war's state, at least they've found the beginnings of gentle withdrawal . . . there's never been the space or time to talk about it, and perhaps no need--but both know, clearly, it's better together, snuggled in, than back out in the paper, fires, khaki, steel of the Home Front. That, indeed, the Home Front is something of a fiction and lie, designed, not too subtly, to draw them apart, to subvert love in favor of work, abstraction, required pain, bitter death.

Philip K. Dick, "Man, Android, and Machine" in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick (Lawrence Sutin, ed.) page 211

Within the universe there exists fierce cold things, which I have given the name "machines" to. Their behavior frightens me, especially when it imitates human behavior so well that I get the uncomfortable sense that these things are trying to pass themselves off as humans but are not. I call them "androids," which is my own way of using that word. By "android" I do not mean a sincere attempt to create in the laboratory a human being... I mean a thing somehow generated to deceive us in a cruel way, to cause us to think it to be one of ourselves. Made in a laboratory--that aspect is not meaningful to me; the entire universe is one vast laboratory, and out of it come sly and cruel entities that smile as they reach out to shake hands. But their handshake is the grip of death, and their smile has the coldness of the grave.

Robert Musil, The Confusions of Young Törless page 72

It struck him that he had once, standing with his father before one of those landscapes, cried out unexpectedly, "Oh, how beautiful that is" -- and had been embarrassed by his father's pleasure. On that occasion he might just as easily have said: "How terribly sad it is." It was a failure of words that tormented him then, a half-awareness that the words were merely random excuses for what he had felt.

And today he remembered the picture, he remembered the words, and he clearly recalled lying about that feeling even though he did not know why. His eye ran through everything again in his memory. But it returned unassuaged, again and again. A smile of delight at the wealth of ideas that he still clutched as though distractedly, slowly assumed a barely perceptible, painful trait...

He felt the need to persist in his search for a bridge, a context, a comparison -- between himself and that which stood silently before his mind.

But however often he had calmed himself with a thought, that incomprehensible objection remained: you're lying. It was as though he had to pass through an unstoppable division of soldiers, a stubborn remnant forever leaping out at him, or as though he was wearing his feverish fingers raw trying to undo an endless knot.

And finally he gave up. The room closed in around him, and his memories burgeoned in unnatural distortions.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea p. 7

The best thing would be to write down events from day to day. Keep a diary to see clearly--let none of the nuances or small happenings escape even though they might seem to mean nothing. And above all, classify them. I must tell how I see this table, this street, the people, my packet of tobacco, since those are the things which have changed. I must determine the exact extent and nature of this change.

For instance, here is a cardboard box holding my bottle of ink. I should try to tell how I saw it before and now how I¹ Well, it's a parallelopiped rectangle, it opens--that's stupid, there's nothing I can say about it. This is what I have to avoid, I must not put in strangeness where there is none. I think that is the big danger in keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything. You continually force the truth because you're always looking for something. On the other hand, it is certain that from one minute to the next--and precisely à propos of this box or any other object at all I can recapture this impression of day-before-yesterday. I must always be ready, otherwise it will slip through my fingers. I must never² but carefully note and detail all that happens.

¹ Word left out.
² Word crossed out (possibly "force" or "forge"), another word added above, is illegible.