[How] even to touch the greatest task … if you cannot collect yourself in such a way that, when the decisive moment comes, you hold the totality of yourself collected in your hand like a stone to be thrown, a knife for the kill?
– Franz Kafka quoted by Nicholas Murray in Kafka, p. 263
Although our every past experience is perfectly preserved in pure memory, “to act is just to induce this memory to shrink, or rather to become thinned and sharpened, so that it presents nothing thicker than the edge of a blade to actual experience, into which it will thus be able to penetrate.”
– Henri Bergson quoted by Peter Hallward in Out of this World, p. 33
For both Bacon and Kafka, the spinal column is nothing but a sword beneath the skin slipped into the body of an innocent sleeper by an executioner.
– Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith, Uni. of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2004, p. 21
I’ve never stopped fleeing, but as I flee, I’m looking for a weapon
– George Jackson quoted by Gilles Deleuze in Desert Islands and Other Texts, trans. Michael Taormina, Semiotext(e), London, 2004, p. 270
