Jeg er den mest vanvittige løgneren i verden. Det er helt fryktelig. Hvis jeg er på vei ut til butikken for å kjøpe et blad og noen spør meg hvor jeg skal, er jeg troende til å si at jeg skal i operaen. Det er helt skrekkelig.

Klagar du -

Klagar du livet for gråe dagar,
umetta magar,
sorger og sår?
Verst er å gå frå usådd åker
og ufødd vår.

Porschen var en kontinental passasjer med lavt tyngdepunkt og altfor gode kjøreegenskaper. Den var ikke praktisk. Presset inn mellom lastebiler, kystbussen, pick-uper, SUV-er og praktiske stasjonsvogner med babyseter og familiekaos som alle raget høyere enn 911-en så den ut som en bitteliten, hissig veskehund midt i en dyretransport med kveg på vei til slakteriet. Den hørte ikke hjemme på en ferge.

Det er åpenbart at alt du skriver, er preget av en forferdelig pessimisme. Kunne du nevne tre etter din mening gode grunner til å utsette selvmordet? [Spørsmål til Houellebecq i samtale fra 1995]

I said I was fine, no really, life was OK, I was coping, writing a new novel, no, fine, fine, really fine. When we parted she held on to me tight and said, “I love you, Logan. Don’t let’s lose touch.” I couldn’t stop the tears and neither could she, so she lit a cigarette and I said it looked like rain wasn’t far off, and somehow we managed to part.

Livet? Det er langt.

Han hadde gjort det til sitt ansvar at ingen han elsket, måtte dø. Det er en forferdelig tyngde for et menneske. Skuldrene knaker, skjelettet bøyer seg, til slutt kan man nesten ikke gå.

Bokens åpningsavsnitt:

Julia, by marriage Mrs. Packett, by courtesy Mrs. Macdermot, lay in her bath singing the Marseillaise. Her fine robust contralto, however, was less resonant than usual; for on this particular summer morning the bathroom, in addition to the ordinary fittings, contained a lacquer coffee table, seven hatboxes, half a dinner service, a small grandfather clock, all Julia’s clothes, a single-bed mattress, thirty-five novelettes, three suitcases, and a copy of a Landseer stag. The customary echo was therefore lacking; and if the ceiling now and then trembled, it was not because of Julia’s song, but because the men from the Bayswater Hire Furniture Company had not yet finished removing the hired furniture.
On the other side of the door an occasional shuffling of feet showed that the two broker’s men had not even one chair to sit on.
Thus beleaguered, Julia sang. With every breath she drew in a generous diaphragmful of verbena-scented steam, and let it out again in the form of equally generous chest-notes. She did this not out of defiance, nor to keep her spirits up, but because at that time of the morning song was natural to her. The belligerence of her tones was due simply to the belligerence of the melody: her choice of the melody was due simply to the fact that she had received, the night before, a letter from France.

For it was Saturday night, the best and bingiest glad-time of the week, one of the fifty-two holidays in the slow-turning Big Wheel of the year, a violent preamble to a prostrate Sabbath. Piled-up passions were exploded on Saturday night, and the effect of a week’s monotonous graft in the factory was swilled out of your system in a burst of goodwill. You followed the motto of ‘be drunk and be happy’, kept your crafty arms around female waists, and felt the beer going beneficially down into the elastic capacity of your guts.

Romanens åpningsavsnitt:

Milly, she felt, would be a good name. Quiet, undistinguished, and as different from her real name as it was possible to be.
Real? Who needed to be real, travelling on the Inner Circle at four o’clock on a Monday afternoon? Staring past the blank, middle-aged faces opposite, she caught sight of her own blank, middle-aged face reflected in the scurrying blackness of the window beyond. She almost laughed at the likeness between the whole lot of them, and at the feeling of safety it gave her. It’s because of London Passenger Transport, she mused, dreamy and almost light-headed by now from lack of food and sleep: we’re just the Passenger part of London Passenger Transport. How marvellous to be just a swaying statistic, gently nodding, staring into space! Statistical space. Nobody, she reflected, ever brings their real selves with them on to a tube train. None of us have. We have all left our identities behind in some vast spiritual Left Luggage office: and no one could guess—no one, possibly, could ever guess, just by looking—that there is one among all these glazed faces that has left its identity behind not just for the duration of the tube journey, but for ever.

That’s all your life amounts to in the end: the aggregate of all the good luck and the bad luck you experience. Everything is explained by that simple formula. Tot it up—look at the respective piles. There’s nothing you can do about it: nobody shares it out, allocates it to this one or that, it just happens. We must quietly suffer the laws of man’s condition, as Montaigne says.

Those were the years when I was truly happy. Knowing that is both a blessing and a curse. It’s good to acknowledge that you found true happiness in your life—in that sense your life has not been wasted. But to admit that you will never be happy like that again is hard.

And suddenly I wonder: is it more of my bad luck to have been born when I was, at the beginning of this century and not be able to be young at its end? I look enviously at these kids and think about the lives they are living—and will live—and posit a kind of future for them. And then, almost immediately, I think what a futile regret that is. You must live the life you have been given. In sixty years’ time, if these boys and girls are lucky enough, they will be old men and women looking at the new generation of bright boys and girls and wishing that time had not fled by—

I think . . . I never really expected my life to be like this, somehow. What happened to those youthful dreams and ambitions? What happened to those vital, fascinating books I was going to write?
I believe my generation was cursed by the war, that “great adventure” (for those of us who survived unmaimed) right bang slap in the middle of our lives—our prime. It lasted so long and it split our lives in two—irrevocably “Before” or “After.” When I think of myself in 1939 and then think of the man I had become in 1946, shattered by my awful tragedy . . . How could I carry on as if nothing had happened? Perhaps, under these circumstances, I haven’t done so badly after all. I’ve kept the LMS show on the road—and there is still time for Octet.

Romanen åpner slik:

"Yo, Logan,” I wrote. “Yo, Logan Mountstuart, vivo en la Villa Flores, Avenida de Brasil, Montevideo, Uruguay, America del Sur, El Mundo, El Sistema Solar, El Universo.” These were the first words I wrote—or to be more precise, this is the earliest record of my writing and the beginning of my writing life—words that were inscribed on the flyleaf of an indigo pocket diary for the year 1912 (which I still possess and whose pages are otherwise void). I was six years old. It intrigues me now to reflect that my first written words were in a language not my own. My lost fluency in Spanish is probably my greatest regret about my otherwise perfectly happy childhood. The serviceable, error-dotted, grammatically unsophisticated Spanish that I speak today is the poorest of poor cousins to that instinctive colloquial jabber that spilled out of me for the first nine years of my life. Curious how these early linguistic abilities are so fragile, how unthinkingly and easily the brain lets them go. I was a bilingual child in the true sense, namely that the Spanish I spoke was indistinguishable from that of a Uruguayan.

Uruguay, my native land, is held as fleetingly in my head as the demotic Spanish I once unconsciously spoke. I retain an image of a wide brown river with trees clustered on the far bank as dense as broccoli florets. On this river, there is a narrow boat with a single person sitting in the stern. A small outboard motor scratches a dwindling, creamy wake on the turbid surface of the river as the boat moves downstream, the ripples of its progress causing the reeds at the water’s edge to sway and nod and then grow still again as the boat passes on. Am I the person in the boat or am I the observer on the bank?

Next, a rolltop wooden sidebord displaying spider plant cuttings in glass jars, an avocado seed just starting to sprout, and a vinyl record player, two floor-standing speakers connected to an amplifier on a low wall shelf; above that, an LP collection with a few prized pieces facing outwards (a limited edition In Rainbows, a first edition Kraftwerk); a dracaena casting a shadow like a spindly hand; a Primavera Sound poster.

Hvis ikke mennesker kan feile, kan de heller ikke lykkes.

Vi trenger i større grad systemer som menneske-optimaliserer, og ikke mennesker som system-optimaliserer.

Mennesker oppnår suksess, systemer sikrer prosess.

Men i sivilisasjonen må vi alle holde balansen. Ikke drikke for mye, ikke gråte for høyt, ikke danse for tett. Rus, men ikke for mye. Kroppskontakt, men ikke for mye. Som om det hele bare er en test for å sjekke hvem som faller utenfor.