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People write books for children and other people write about the books written for children but I don’t think it’s for the children at all. I think that all the people who worry so much about the children are really worrying about themselves, about keeping their world together and getting the children to help them do it, getting the children to agree that it is indeed a world. Each new generation of children has to be told: ‘This is a world, this is what one does, one lives like this.’ Maybe our constant fear is that a generation of children will come along and say: ‘This is not a world, this is nothing, there’s no way to live at all.’

Russell Hoban, Turtle Diary (1975)

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When I was a child there was a mirror in the hallway and at some point I became aware that the mirror saw more than what was simply right in front of it. It privately reflected a good deal of hallway on both sides out of the corner of its eye so to speak. By putting my nose right up against the glass I could almost see round those corners, could almost see what the mirror was keeping to itself, the whole hallway perhaps. All of it, everything, things I couldn’t see. Spiders in webs in the shadows, the other side of the light through the coloured leaded glass of the door. The shadow of the postman today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow.

Russell Hoban, Turtle Diary (1975)

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It was absolutely uncanny, gave me the creeps. That woman actually thought I’d been thinking of suicide. I had been thinking of it right enough, I often do, always have the idea of it huddled like a sick ape in a corner of my mind. But I’d never do it. At least I don’t think I’d do it, can’t imagine a state of mind in which I’d do it. Well, that’s not true either. I can imagine the state of mind, I’ve been in it often enough. No place for the self to sit down and catch its breath. Just being hurried, hurried out of existence. When I feel like that even such a thing as posting a letter or going to the launderette wears me out. The mind moves ahead of every action making me tired in advance of whatever I do. Even a thing as simple as changing trains in the Underground becomes terribly heavy. I think ahead to the sign on the platform at the next station, think of getting out of the train, going through the corridor, up the escalator, waiting on the platform. I think of how many trains will come before mine, think of getting on when it comes, think of the signs that will appear, think of getting out, going up the steps, out into the street. As the mind moves forward the self is pushed back, everything multiplies itself like mirrors receding laboriously to infinity, repeating endlessly even the earwax in the ears, the silence in the eyes.

Russell Hoban, Turtle Diary (1975)

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Sometimes I think that this whole thing, this whole business of a world that keeps waking itself up and bothering to go on every day, is necessary only as a manifestation of the intolerable. The intolerable is like H. G. Wells’s invisible man, it has to put on clothes in order to be seen. So it dresses itself up in a world. Possibly it looks in a mirror but my imagination doesn’t go that far. It’s been at least twenty-five years since I read Crime and Punishment. Now I’m reading it again. I’d forgotten that when Raskolnikov murdered the old lady pawnbroker, Alyona Ivanovna, he also killed her half-sister Lizaveta. Lizaveta was ‘a soft gentle creature, ready to put up with anything, always willing, willing to do anything.’ When she came back to the flat just after Raskolnikov had killed the old woman he had to kill her as well. Alyona Ivanovna and Lizaveta always do live together, always die together. You try to kill some aspect of the intolerable and you kill the gentle and the good as well. Over and over. And whoever kills some form of the intolerable becomes himself a manifestation of it, to be killed with his good and gentle by someone else. Two by two up the gangway to the ark. But the waters will never recede.

Russell Hoban, Turtle Diary (1975)

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Sometimes I think that the biggest difference between men and women is that more men need to seek out some terrible lurking thing in existence and hurl themselves upon it like Ahab with the White Whale. Women know where it lives but they can let it alone. Even in matriarchal societies I doubt that there were ever female Beowulfs. Women lie with gods and demons but they don’t go looking for monsters to fight with. Ariadne gave Theseus a clew but the Minotaur was his business. There are of course many men who walk in safe paths all their lives but they often seem a little apologetic, as if they think themselves not quite honourable. And there are others, quiet men, obscure, ungifted, who yet require satisfaction of some grim thing that ultimately kills them.

Russell Hoban, Turtle Diary (1975)

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Too-lateness, I realized, has nothing to do with age. It’s a relation of self to the moment. Too-lateness is potentially every moment. Or not, depending on the person and the moment. Perhaps there even comes a time when it’s no longer too late for anything. Perhaps, even, most times are too early for most things, and most of life has to go by before it’s time for almost anything and too late for almost nothing. Nothing to lose, the present moment to gain, the integration with long-delayed Now.

Russell Hoban, Turtle Diary (1975)

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Many American couples as they age seem to make a sexual exchange: the man looks feminine, the woman masculine. Or perhaps the woman takes over both sexes and the man vacates his altogether.

Russell Hoban, Turtle Diary (1975)

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Pity, in a way. If she’d been young and pretty would I have tried to extend the conversation? Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t really want to talk to a woman who’s accumulated the sort of things in her head that I have in mine. And I haven’t had much interest in women at all for a while, not in a realistic way. Fantasies, yes. But not actualities, not practicalities.

Russell Hoban, Turtle Diary (1975)

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At Greenwich I went straight to the Port Liberty model after the guards at the door had looked into my envelope and found no bombs. They have to take precautions, that’s understandable. A place like Greenwich is a temptation. The greenness and the stillness, the augustness of the buildings and the observatory dome almost make one want to set off a bomb just out of respect.

Russell Hoban, Turtle Diary (1975)

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All the little beach-hut fronts pushed me towards the sea and I jumped down from the wall on to the pebbles that rolled and clicked under me as I walked. I thought: what if there were a stone with my name on it? Then I thought, what if my name were on every stone? Then: the name of every stone is in me. I can’t say the name of every stone but it is in me.

Russell Hoban, Turtle Diary (1975)

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Darkness is only smoke that hangs suffocatingly over the low red heat of the sunken day.

D.H. Lawrence, The Trespasser (1912)

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He was out of it. Already he felt detached from life. He belonged to his destination. It is always so: we have no share in the beauty that lies between us and our goal.

D.H. Lawrence, The Trespasser (1912)

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‘I only mean you were staring rather hard at nothing. It’s a pity to try and stare out of a beautiful blue day like this, don’t you think?’ ‘Stare beyond it, you mean?’ asked Siegmund. ‘Exactly!’ replied the other, with a laugh of intelligence. ‘I call a day like this “the blue room”. It’s the least draughty apartment in all the confoundedly draughty House of Life.’ [...] ‘I mean,’ the man explained, ‘that after all, the great mass of life that washes unidentified, and that we call death, creeps through the blue envelope of the day, and through our white tissue, and we can’t stop it, once we’ve begun to leak.’ ‘What do you mean by “leak”?’ asked Siegmund. ‘Goodness knows — I talk through my hat. But once you’ve got a bit tired of the house, you glue your nose to the windowpane, and stare for the dark — as you were doing.’

D.H. Lawrence, The Trespasser (1912)

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‘The days used to walk in procession like seven marionettes, each in order and costume, going endlessly round.’ She laughed, amused at the idea. ‘It is very strange,’ she continued, ‘to have the days and nights smeared into one piece, as if the clock-hand only went round once in a lifetime.’ ‘That is how it is,’ he admitted, touched by her eloquence. ‘You have torn the labels off things, and they all are so different. This morning! It does seem absurd to talk about this morning. Why should I be parcelled up into mornings and evenings and nights? I am not made up of sections of time. Now, nights and days go racing over us like cloud-shadows and sunshine over the sea, and all the time we take no notice.’

D.H. Lawrence, The Trespasser (1912)

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I don’t know whether the distaste was there first and gave rise to the illness, or whether the illness was there first and gave rise to the distaste for this particular society, for social gatherings of this kind and for society in general. I don’t know. Did I drive them away, all these people, or did they withdraw from me? I don’t know. Did I cease having dealings with them or they with me? I don’t know. I once conceived the idea of writing about all these people, but then I gave it up: it was too silly. There comes a time when we actually think about these people, and then suddenly we hate them, and so we get rid of them, or they get rid of us; because we see them clearly all at once, we have to withdraw from their company or they from ours. For years I believed that I couldn’t be alone, that I needed all these people, but in fact I don’t: I’ve got on perfectly well without them. They only come to unburden themselves and to unload all their misery on to me, together with all the dirt that goes with it. We invite them thinking they’ll bring us something, something pleasant or refreshing of course, but all they do is deprive us of whatever we have. They come into our houses and force us into some corner where we can’t escape and suck us dry in the most ruthless fashion, until there’s nothing left inside us but the disgust they inspire; then they leave us standing, alone once more with all our private horrors.

Thomas Bernhard, Concrete (1982)

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However old we are, we go on expecting things to change, I told myself, we’re always waiting for a decisive change, because our minds are anything but clear. All the decisive changes took place many years ago, but at the time we didn’t recognize them as decisive.

Thomas Bernhard, Concrete (1982)

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This is how we swing ourselves over the abyss, not knowing how deep it is. And in fact the depth does not matter if everybody falls to his death, which we know to be the case.

Thomas Bernhard, Concrete (1982)