a. natasha joukovsky
extracts blog
After Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, where he tracks allusions to whales and cetology, I keep a running list of references to recursion, innovation, mythology, and glamour.
George Eliot | MIDDLEMARCH
"Art is an old language with a great many artificial affected styles, and sometimes the chief pleasure one gets out of knowing them is the mere sense of knowing."
Sun Tzu | THE ART OF WAR
"All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when we are able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must appear inactive; when we are near..."
Antoine de Saint-Exupery | WIND, SAND, AND STARS
"In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away..."
Donna Tartt | THE SECRET HISTORY
"His students--if they were any mark of his tutelage--were imposing enough, and different as they all were they shared a certain coolness, a cruel, mannered charm which was not modern in the least..."
Oscar Wilde | THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY
"This portrait would be to him the most magical of mirrors. As it had revealed to him his own body, so it would reveal to him his own soul..."
Magda Szabo | THE DOOR
"We were liars, cheats, she began--none of it was real. The trees had been made to move by a trick, it was only the branches. someone was filming from a helicopter, circling around..."
Joris-Karl Huysmans | À REBOURS
"Formerly, during his Parisian days, his love for artificiality had led him to abandon real flowers and to use in their place replicas faithfully executed by means of the miracles performed with India rubber and wire..."
Virginia Postrel | THE POWER OF GLAMOUR
"glamour can serve many purposes: individual and collective; personal, social, commercial, or political. The story of glamour is the story of human longing and its cultural manifestations..."
Ovid | METAMORPHOSES
"As he tried
To quench his thirst, inside him, deep within him,
Another thirst was growing, for he saw
An image in the pool, and fell in love..."