10 Quotes by Luc Sante

Night is the permanent revolution, that of the globe. Every sundown the streets change, becoming sinister or libidinous, or, for that matter, longer or narrower or unexpectedly twisted. The familiar rebels against those who presume to know it. The map is altered and time is telescoped. Daylight restores things to their normal condition, or is that really their normal condition? The map of the city wrinkles and unfolds, wrinkles and unfolds.

...for years the first of May was the day all leases expired, and on that day mass migrations would take place, with families lugging eiderdowns and ancestral portraits through the streets, as if in parody of the march of the wagon trains.

The ghosts of Manhattan are not the spirits of the propertied classes; these are entombed in their names, their works, their constructions. New York's ghosts are the unresting souls of the poor, the marginal, the dispossessed, the depraved, the defective, the recalcitrant. They are the guardian spirits of the urban wilderness in which they lived and died. Unrecognized by the history that is common knowledge, they push invisibly behind it to erect their memorials in the collective unconscious.

We thought of [New York] as a free city, like one of those storied prewar tropical nests of intrigue and licentiousness where exiles and lamsters and refugees found shelter in a tangle of improbable juxtapositions.

خين يقع قلمي في السجع المبتذل أو التكرار السيء، أعلم يقيناً أنني أتخبط في الغلط. وعند البحث أجد ضالتي؛ أعني التعبير الدقيق، الذي يكون دائماً تعبيراً واحداً فقط، ثم أتبيّن فيما بعد أنه متناغم صوتياً كذلك. لا تغيب المفردة أبدأ إذا كان المرء مسيطراً على فكرتهز

يمكن أن تكون اللغة أداة مرح، لكنه ليس بالضرورة مرح آمن ومأذون به؛ بل يكون مرحاً جامحاً وفوضوياً ومعكراً للصفو. إن توظيف اللغة في الرسومات لم يكن أمراً اعتباطياً، بل كان أمراً مقصوداً بيّناً

Mention me when they ask you what happened. I am everywhere under your feet.

A lot of my favourite American writers are from the 1930s to the 60s. James Agee, Joseph Mitchell, AJ Liebling, Meyer Berger: they relied on their intuitions, didn’t follow any who-what-where rules of reporting, frequently portrayed a contrary viewpoint. They all over-identified with their subjects. There’s never the slightest pretence of objectivity.

The ghosts of Manhattan are not the spirits of the propertied classes; these are entombed in their names, their works, their constructions. New York’s ghosts are the unresting souls of the poor, the marginal, the dispossessed, the depraved, the defective, the recalcitrant. They are the guardian spirits of the urban wilderness in which they lived and died. Unrecognized by the history that is common knowledge, they push invisibly behind it to erect their memorials in the collective unconscious.