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“I may be entering my Final Days.” Gravely, matter-of-factly he begins to speak in this way. He begins to speak of “my final days.” Final Days. The words strike terror into my heart. In a way I cannot believe that I am hearing such words. Matter-of-fact words. No. Yet there is something dignified, noble about such words. “I may be entering my Final Days.”

"the usual 'I' we are given has all the tidy containment of the kind of character the realist novel specialises in and none of the porousness of our every waking moment, the loose threads, the strange dreams, the forgetting and misrememberings, the portions of life lived through others' stories, the incoherence and inconsistency, the pantheon of dei ex machina and the companionability of ghosts. There are other ways of telling." The Faraway Nearby

Angst bestaat uit drie fasen. Denk aan een antilope en een roofdier dat het op haar gemunt heeft. Op open plekken is de antilope behoedzaam, ook al is er niet meteen een roofdier te zien. Ze zet haar aandacht heel breed en speurt de omgeving af. Er bekruipt haar een onbehagelijk gevoel. Dat noemen we angst. Als het roofdier plots opduikt, dan gaat dat over in vrees. Dan is de antilope daar volledig op gefocust. Ze kan aan niets anders meer denken dan aan het acute gevaar. Valt het roofdier aan, dan komen we bij paniek. Dan is het alle hens aan dek. Een antilope zal met haar bekende bokkensprongen wegduiken in de hoop het roofdier te slim af te zijn.

“If only there were a place where the living and the dead could meet, to tell their tales, to weep, I would reach for you — not so you could forgive me, but so you would know that I have no pride for what I’ve done, only the wisdom and regret that came too late.”

of any live band I saw, they certainly had the biggest effect,” Nick Cave told me much later. “They were the ones who could actually play

“There was a lot of hype by the time we got to London cause the punky rock thing had taken off, but back in Oz we wouldn’t have been pissed on if we were on fire,”

One of Houellebecq’s more endearing juvenile enthusiasms is his passion for quantum mechanics, his admiration for the physicist Niels Bohr, and his belief that culture has not yet caught up with the mind-blowing implications of 20th-century theoretical physics. In a typical 1995 interview with Jean-Yves Jouannais and Christophe Duchâtelet, the author warns: “We’re moving towards disaster, guided by a false image of the world; and no one realizes.” The problem, Houellebecq thinks, is that “we’re stuck in a mechanistic and individualistic view of the world,” as a result of which, he predicts, “we will die.” Of course, many physicists and philosophers of science have themselves grappled with the problem of how to preserve what is sometimes called “the manifest image” of the world, while also accepting the reality of such puzzling phenomena as quantum superposition. Many believe our minds are simply so evolved as to keep us constantly convinced of the reality of midsized physical objects, of individual humans and animals, of all that is “manifest,” even if our best theory tells us it’s all in fact a lot more complicated than that. If failure to think in consistently quantum-theoretical terms leads to death, one would want to ask Houellebecq what it’s like to pass one’s time in a state of such profound enlightenment that even Bohr and Erwin Schrödinger only dipped into it as their work required. But of course Houellebecq is in no such state. He is not living each moment in full light of the implications of quantum theory, and his insistence that we must do so reminds us more of the common than of the exceptional quality of his mind.