"A poet's work . . . to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep."
—Salman Rushdie

"Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one."
—Salman Rushdie

"The poetic art is no more and no less than the repayment of old debts to life and to the mystery of life."
—Vítězslav Nezval, in his foreword to Valerie and Her Week of Wonders

"The world we live in is a world of effects; the realm of true causes is hidden.  If we should ever discover it we would be able to perform magic."
—Gustav Meyrink, The Green Face

"If one man has an idea, that just means that many others will have the same idea at the same time.  Anyone who doesn't see that doesn't know what an idea is.  Thoughts are contagious, even if they are not expressed; perhaps most contagious when they are not expressed."
—Gustav Meyrink, The Green Face

"If I remember correctly writers usually find some excuse for their books, although why one should excuse oneself for having such a quiet and peaceful occupation I really don't know.  Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be ready by anybody."
—Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet

"Every new invention, every new idea to appear in the world puts on a grotesque face as it develops."
—Gustav Meyrink, The Green Face

"Schoolmasters ... are like animal tamers; the latter think it is important for lions to jump through hoops, the former spend all their time getting children to remember that the late lamented Hannibal lost his left eye in the Pontine swamps; the one turns the king of the desert into a circus clown, the other a divine flower into a bunch of parsley."
—Gustav Meyrink, The White Dominican

"Nowadays everyone thinks they can organize; that shows how wrong it must be.  What is right is always the opposite of what the herd does."
—Gustav Meyrink, The Green Face

"Our teachers are like sorcerer's apprentices, who spend all their time deforming the mind, until the heart dies of thirst.  When they have accomplished that, they declare their students ready to go out into the world."
—Gustav Meyrink, The White Dominican

"All things are possible, and the longer they are in coming, the more probable they are."
—Gustav Meyrink, The Green Face

"People under seventy and over seven are very unreliable if they are not cats."
—Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet

"All complaints about the supposed injustice of fate were silenced by the knowledge that we all follow the road we have chosen."
—Gustav Meyrink, The Green Face

"If we look at reality for more than an instant, if we look at the human beings passing us on the street, it’s not bearable."
—playwright Wallace Shawn

"Take life less seriously and dreams more so, then things will improve, then the dream can become your leader instead of, as now, going around as a garish clown in the motley shreds of our daytime memories."
—Gustav Meyrink, The White Dominican

"There is no law on earth that does not evoke the Eumenides [the Furies]."
—Petit-Senn, Le Portefeuille, qtd. in Malpertuis by Jean Ray

"Our shadows: the bond that ties us to the earth, the black ghost that emanates from us, revealing the death within us, where light strikes our bodies!"
—Gustav Meyrink, The White Dominican

"Sometimes you can fan the flame of your thoughts so vigorously that they give off a spray of sparks that fly to the brain of the person standing next to you."
—Gustav Meyrink, The Golem

Older and older men are starting families, and when we see white-haired grandfatherly types out and about with their newborns, we can't help but to see classic archetypes at play: Father Time and Baby New Year.  Here they are as depicted in Life magazine, 1902:

Each single action here on earth
Accords with nature's rule;
"I am the author of this act"—
Thus speaks the self-deceiving fool.
—Gustav Meyrink, The White Dominican