Quotes from Lars Iyer

It is possible to bathe in nonsense ... to be refreshed by it.

As we look out to sea, a great shadow seems to move under the water. He can see it, says W. - 'Look: the kraken of your idiocy'. Yes, there it is, moving darkly beneath the water.

You have to be gentle with the young, W. says. They're a gentle generation, like fauns, he says, and require a special tenderness. Their lives are going to be bad--very bad--and, at the very least, we should be tender with them, and not remind them of what is to come.

If a book doesn't make you want to throw it aside and think your own thoughts, what use is it?

Benwell's too late for politics, and we are too late for politics, Ede says. Too late for the Occupation. Too late to march on the streets …

Only the tourists really understand Cambridge, Wittgenstein says. Cambridge is only there to be photographed: that's what they grasp. Cambridge is a collective fantasy …

I romanticised Mancunian despair, W says. I didn't realise that Mancunian despair is only the desire to leave Manchester

We're English. There's no cure for that.

But I neglected to tell him about the Age of Shit. I didn't tell him about the shape of the age to come, which is becoming clearer and clearer to him. War will be all, devouring all, W. says. Human beings will be like rats, like vermin. And the skies will burn, W. says. He can see them burning.

The criterion for a book of worth is: does it make you think more, W. says.

And isn't that the only reason to read, W. says: to experience your limits anew? To experience your idiocy?

Did we really think we could escape the end of philosophy?, W. wonders. Did we really think we could make a philosophy out of the end times, when the end times means: the end of philosophy?

Everything begins when you understand that you, and you above all, are Max Brod: this, for W., is the founding principle. That you (whoever you are) are Max Brod, and everyone else (whoever that might be) is Franz Kafka. Which is to say, you will never understand anyone else and are endlessly guilty before them, and that even with the greatest effort of loyalty, you will betray them at every turn.

We have to remember not to tell them, each of them, that they are our new leader. It would only frighten them off, W. says. No one should ever know he or she is our leader, we agree. Only we should know. And we should follow them in secret.

Expectation is the greatest impediment to living, running ahead to tomorrow, it loses today.