Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed page 310

Very late on the following ship night, Shevek was in the Davenant's garden. The lights were out, there, and it was illuminated only by starlight. The air was quite cold. A night-blooming flower from some unimaginable world had opened among the dark leaves and was sending out its perfume with patient, unavailing sweetness to attract some unimaginable moth trillions of miles away, in a garden on a world circling another star. The sunlights differ, but there is only one darkness.

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed page 52

He went to the windows of the big room and stood looking out. The room was high. He was startled at first and drew back, unused to being in a building of more than one storey. It was like looking down from a dirigible; one felt detached from the ground, dominant, uninvolved.

Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus pages 270-271

My general information permitted me to associate a concept, however unprecise, with the words "light-year." It was, of course, a spatial concept and the word meant the span that light puts behind it in the course of a whole earth-year, at a speed peculiar to it, of which I had a vague idea but Adrian had in his head the exact figure of 186,000 miles per second. So a light-year amounted to a round and net figure of six trillion miles, and the eccentricity of our solar system amounted to thirty thousand times as much, while the whole diameter of the galactic hollow ball came to two hundred thousand light-years.

No, it was not immeasurable, but it was in this way that it was to be measured. What is one to say to such an assault upon the human understanding? I confess to being so made that nothing but a resigned if also somewhat contemptuous shoulder-shrug remains to me in face of such ungraspable, such stunning statistics. Enthusiasm for size, being overwhelmed by size--that is no doubt a mental pleasure; but it is only possible in connections which a human being can grasp. The Pyramids are large, Mont Blanc and the inside of the dome of St. Peter's are large, unless one prefer to reserve this attribute of largeness to the mental and moral world, the nobility of the heart and of thought. The data of the cosmic creation are nothing but a deafening bombardment of our intelligence with figures furnished with a comet's tail of a couple of dozen ciphers, and comporting themselves as though they still had something, anything, to do with measurement and understanding. There is in all this monstrousness nothing that could appeal to the likes of me as goodness, beauty, greatness; and I shall never understand the glory-to-God mental attitude which certain temperaments assume when they contemplate the "works of God," meaning by the phrase the physics of the universe. And is a construction to be hailed as "the works of God" when one may just as reasonably say: "Well, what then?" instead of "Glory to the Lord"? The first rather than the second seems to me the right answer to two dozen ciphers after a one or even after a seven, which really adds nothing to it; and I can see no sort of reason to fall in the dust and adore the fifth power of a million.

Samuel Beckett, Watt pages 74-75

Watt's stay in Mr Knott's house was less agreeable, on this account, than it would have been, if such incidents had been unknown, or his attitude towards them less anxious, that is to say, if Mr Knott's house had been another house, or Watt another man. For outside Mr Knott's house, and of course grounds, such incidents were unknown, or so Watt supposed. And Watt could not accept them for what they perhaps were, the simple games that time plays with space, now with these toys, and now with those, but was obliged, because of his peculiar character, to enquire into what they meant, oh not into what they really meant, his character was not so peculiar as all that, but into what they might be intended to mean, with the help of a little patience, a little ingenuity.

Gabriel Josipovici, What Ever Happened to Modernism? pages 158-159

Seeing the art of the twentieth century in the light of the ancient Greek stage can help us to understand many things. Why, for example, Gert Hofmann and Agota Kristof chose to write in the first person plural, or why the attitude of so many artists to the objects they chose to depict changed radically from what it had been in earlier times. Kafka's first diary entry, for example, dated 1910, describes an event and not a person or even a group of people: 'The onlookers go rigid when the train goes past (Die Zuschauer erstarren, wenn der Zug vorbeifährt).' Kafka is interested not in the people on the station platform and not in the train but in what-happens-when-the-train-goes-rushing-past. Writing about his 1911 painting of a coffee mill, Duchamp puts it very clearly: 'Instead of making an objective, figurative coffee-grinding machine, I did a description of the mechanism. You see the cogwheel and you see the turning handle at the top, with an arrow showing the direction in which it turned, so there was the idea of movement.' The depiction of movement, which is such an obsession with Duchamp and which can be seen to lie behind such early filmic masterpieces as René Clair's Entr'acte and Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera, is not a result of the artists' obsession with the new and faster means of travel appearing at the time, as positivist historians assert; those means of travel, as well as the possibilities of film, rather, help artists return to those older principles of art: the imitation not of character but of action.

Susan Sontag, On Photography page 13

Eventually, people might learn to act out more of their aggressions with cameras and fewer with guns, with the price being an even more image-choked world. One situation where people are switching from bullets to film is the photographic safari that is replacing the gun safari in East Africa. The hunters have Hasselblads instead of Winchesters; instead of looking through a telescopic sight to aim a rifle, they look through a viewfinder to frame a picture. In end-of-the-century London, Samuel Butler complained that "there is a photographer in every bush, going about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour." The photographer is now charging real beasts, beleaguered and too rare to kill. Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been--what people needed protection from. Now nature--tamed, endangered, mortal--needs to be protected from people. When we are afraid, we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures.

Susan Sontag, On Photography page 9

Most tourists feel compelled to put the camera between themselves and whatever is remarkable that they encounter. Unsure of other responses, they take a picture. This gives shape to experience: stop, take a photograph, and move on. The method especially appeals to people handicapped by a ruthless work ethic--Germans, Japanese, and Americans. Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow page 214

"Holy shit." This is the kind of sunset you hardly see any more, a 19th-century wilderness sunset, a few of which got set down, approximated, on canvas, landscapes of the American West by artists nobody ever heard of, when the land was still free and the eye innocent, and the presence of the Creator much more direct. Here it thunders now over the Mediterranean, high and lonely, this anachronism in primal red, in yellow purer than can be found anywhere today, a purity begging to be polluted . . . of course Empire took its way westward, what other way was there but into those virgin sunsets to penetrate and to foul?

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 page 13

She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she thought of the first time she'd opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There'd seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding.

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 page 10

Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried. No one had noticed; she wore dark green bubble shades. For a moment she'd wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry.

James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State pages 81-82

To this point, I have been making a rather straightforward, even banal point about the simplification, abstraction, and standardization that are necessary for state officials' observations of the circumstances of some or all of the population. But I want to make a further claim, one analogous to that made for scientific forestry: the modern state, through its officials, attempts with varying success to create a terrain and a population with precisely those standardized characteristics that will be easiest to monitor, count, assess, and manage. The utopian, immanent, and continually frustrated goal of the modern state is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality beneath it to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of observations.

Stanislaw Lem, "Non Serviam" in A Perfect Vacuum page 172

A man may interpret the real world in a variety of ways. He may devote particular attention--intense scientific investigation--to certain facets of that world, and the knowledge he acquires then casts its own special light on the remaining portions of the world, those not considered in his priority-setting research. If first he diligently takes up mechanics, he will fashion for himself a mechanical model of the world and will see the Universe as a gigantic and perfect clock that in its inexorable movement proceeds from the past to a precisely determined future. This model is not an accurate representation of reality, and yet one can make use of it for a period of time historically long, and with it can even achieve many practical successes--the building of machines, implements, etc.

Dave Hickey, Air Guitar pages 168-169

The justification for this pretense to disengagement derives from our Victorian habit of marginalizing the experience of art, of treating it as if it were somehow "special"--and, lately, as if it were somehow curable. This is a preposterous assumption to make in a culture that is irrevocably saturated with pictures and music, in which every elevator serves as a combination picture gallery and concert hall. The question of whether we can enjoy, or even decipher, the world we see without the experience of images, or the world we hear without the experience of music, seems to me pretty much a no-brainer. In fact, I cannot imagine a reason for categorizing any part of our involuntary, ordinary experience as "unaesthetic," or for imagining that this quotidian aesthetic experience occludes any "real" or "natural" relationship between ourselves and the world that surrounds us. All we do by ignoring the live effects of art is suppress the fact that these experiences, in one way or another, inform our every waking hour.

In my own case, I can still remember gazing at the lovely, lifting curve of a page upon which Oscar Wilde's argument that "life imitates art" was inscribed and knowing that this was the first "big truth" I had come across in writing. I can remember, as well, standing on the corner of 52nd Street and Third Avenue on a spring afternoon, six feet from a large citizen gouging the pavement with a jackhammer, and thinking about the Ramones, amazed at the preconscious acuity with which I had translated the pneumatic slap of the hammer into eighth-notes and wondering what part, if any, of the pleasures and dangers of the ordinary world might rightly be considered "natural." So it seems to me that, living as we do in the midst of so much ordered light and noise, we must unavoidably internalize certain expectations about their optimal patternings--and that these expectations must be perpetually and involuntarily satisfied, frustrated, and subtly altered every day, all day long, in the midst of things, regardless of what those patterns of light and noise might otherwise signify.

William Gibson, Spook Country page 83

She afforded herself a quick scan of the rest of the clientele. Were a cruise missile just then to impact the corrugated roof of Skybar, she decided, there would be no great need for People to change its next cover.

William Gibson, Spook Country page 4

You are, she told herself, crazy. But that seemed for the moment abundantly okay, even though she knew that this was not a salubrious stretch for any woman, particularly alone. Nor for any pedestrian, this time of the morning. Yet this weather, this moment of anomalous L.A. climate, seemed to have swept any usual sense of threat aside. The street was as empty as that moment in the film just prior to Godzilla's first footfall.

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.