"...the noticeably large divergence between the spoken and the written language...almost to the extent of there being two distinct stages of linguistic development--as that, say, between Middle English and modern English."
--Masao Miyoshi, Accomplices of Silence: The Modern Japanese Novel (1974) [referring to the end of the 19c.]

"I do not believe it an overstatement to say that writing in Japanese is always something of an act of defiance. ...the culture is primarily visual, not verbal, in orientation, and social decorum provides that reticence, not eloquence, is rewarded." --ibid

"...the suicide rate for Japanese writers is 'three hundred times higher than that for Japanese men as a whole'..."
--ibid (footnote)

   2 tankas by Borges: (tr.)

  'The sound of a bird
which the twilight is hiding
  has fallen silent.
You wander in your garden.
I know that you miss something.'

  'Not to have fallen
like others of my lineage,
  cut down in battle.
To be in the fruitless night
he who counts the syllables.'

--from Borges: A Reader ed. Monegal & Reid (1981)
[Was there ever so poignant a use of the word "syllables"...?]

'Isaac Luria the Lion taught that the soul of a dead man can enter an unhappy soul to sustain or instruct it; perhaps the soul of Omar lodged in FitzGerald's around 1857.' --"The Enigma of Edward FitzGerald". op cit

Sign in the window of the Revolutionary Bookstore: "Phony Communism is dead/ Long live real communism". (I can't disagree with the sentiment, but that word is ruined forever.)

And i'm supposed to write--what? an epic about Empire's Nemesis--lyrics about being unemployed??

...how little difference it really makes what's in your head, when your lifestyle is the cancer.

"In the estimate of Fortune magazine, not more than one thousand individuals own or control 90 per cent of the world's economic capacity." --The Big Bang Never Happened, Eric J Lerner (1991)
[footnote: i don't see that nonuniform distribution of stars in an infinite universe wouldn't still result in Olber's Paradox...]

'Hypocrisy is quite as inseparable from being a man as sliminess is from being a fish.' --Kierkegaard