Great Books . . .

“But if it is true that the masterpieces of literature always form a kind of foreign language within the language in which they are written, what wind of madness, what psychotic breath thereby passes into language as a whole? Psychosis characteristically brings into play a procedure that treats an ordinary language, a standard language, in a manner that makes it ‘render’ an original and unknown language, which would perhaps be a projection of God’s language, and would carry off language as a whole.”

“A great book is always the inverse of another book that could only be written in the soul, with silence and blood.”

(Gilles Deleuze, “Bartleby; or, The Formula.”)