'Everything on our way is slippery and dangerous, and the ice that still supports us has become thin; all of us feel the warm, uncanny breath of the thawing wind; where we still walk, soon no one will be able to walk.' --The Will to Power, 57

Primo Levi has an essay on Celan, one camp survivor to another (both later suicides), & criticizes him for being obscure...

"Bring the pigeons watermelons, Abelrd." --Jose Garcia Villa

"Blaspheme when sowing cummin; that is the way to make it grow well." --Stobaeus

'Why, hapless one, to the unhearing rocks,/ To the dumb billows, to the eery woods/ Do I thus cry, and sound my mouth's vain note?' --Moony's Lycophron (1921), 1451

"...we have more names for parts of horses than we have for kinds of kisses..." --William Gass, On Being Blue (1976)

'...in the thirties and forties the regime [i.e. Stalin] was producing writers' widows with such efficiency that in the middle of the sixties there were enough of them to organize a trade union.' --Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One

"Why do the Basques speak Algonquin?" --Eliot Weinberger in Sulfur 30

"In the late 1800s one scientist, Willy Kuhne, from his studies of the action of the chemical rhodopsin, saw the possibility of taking pictures with living eyes, 'optograms'. Among other things, he exposed the eyes of a rabbit to a barred window, then kiled the rabbit, removed its eyes and fixed its retina, upon which was seen the light and dark pattern of the bars. In 1880 he arranged to obtain the eyes of a man who was beheaded, and from them he printed an optogram that does show an image, but one that is impossible to interpret." --Jillian Smith, Senses and Sensibilities (1989)

'You will take the book up where you left it,/ You will say, These were the last obscure words.' --Bonnefoy (tr Richard Pevear)

"Thus either Time his sickle brings
In vain, or else in vain his wings." --Carew

"The local storyteller Johnny Moses (Nuu Chah Nulth tribe) told this Salish tale at a gathering:

'Long ago the trees thought they were people.
Long ago the mountains thought they were people.
Long ago the animals thought they were people.
Someday they will say
Long ago the human beings thought they were people.' " --Brenda Peterson, Living By Water