p.30 To write is to surrender to the fascination of time's absence. [JLJ - to write
is to explore the interesting, almost-real world which appears when the present no longer commands our attention, and is only
faintly present]
p.32 what happens when what you see, although at a distance, seems to touch you
with a gripping contact, when the manner of seeing is a kind of touch, when seeing is contact at a distance? ...What
is given us by this contact at a distance is the image, and fascination is passion for the image.
p.32 Of whoever is fascinated it can be said that he doesn't perceive any real
object, any real figure, for what he sees does not belong to the world of reality, but to the indeterminate milieu of fascination.
p.33 Whoever is fascinated doesn't see, properly speaking, what he sees.
Rather, it touches him in an immediate proximity; it seizes and ceaselessly draws him close, even though
it leaves him absolutely at a distance... Fascination is the relation the gaze entertains - a relation which is itself neutral
and impersonal - with sightless, shapeless depth, the absence one sees because it is blinding.
p.82 Kafka often showed that his genius was a prompt, ready one;
he was capable of reaching the essential in a few swift strokes. But more and more he imposed upon himself a minuteness,
a slow approach, a detailed precision... without which a man exiled from reality is condemned to the errors of confusion and
the approximations of the imaginary. The more one is lost outside, in the strangeness and insecurity of this loss,
the more one must appeal to the spirit of rigor, scruple, exactitude..., he who belongs to the depths of the limitless
and the remote... that person is condemned to an excess of measure... and condemned is the right word. For
if patience, exactitude, and cold mastery are qualities indispensable for not getting lost when nothing subsists that one
could hold onto, patience, exactitude, and cold mastery are also faults which, dividing difficulties and stretching
them out indefinitely, may well retard the shipwreck, but surely retard deliverance, by ceaselessly transforming the
infinite into the indefinite.
p.89 All endeavors transform us; every action we accomplish acts upon us.
p.106 How is it possible to proceed with a firm step toward that which will not allow itself to be charted?
