All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income

Play can consist not only of deploying actions or submitting to one’s fate in an imaginary milieu, but of becoming an illusory character oneself, and of so behaving.

‘Or else it doesn’t, you know. The name of the song is called “Haddock’s Eyes.”’

‘Oh, that’s the name of the song, is it?’

Alice said, trying to feel interested.

‘No, you don’t understand,’

the Knight said, looking a little vexed.

‘That’s what the name is called. The name really is “The Aged Aged Man.”’

‘Then I ought to have said “That’s what the song is called”?’

Alice corrected herself.

‘No, you oughtn’t: that’s quite another thing! The song is called “Ways and Means”: but that’s only what it’s called, you know!’

‘Well, what is the song, then?’

said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.

‘I was coming to that,’

the Knight said.

‘The song really is “A-sitting On A Gate”: and the tune’s my own invention.’

Where is the mirror space? Where are we? It is not here, yet neither is it elsewhere. Is it nowhere? If so, however, it is because then nowhere is here, and here is nowhere.

Whatever you may be, you are not the verbal labels in your passport any more than you are the word self. So you must be prepared to prove at all times that you are what you are not.

I can't go on, I'll go on.

We can be no one and anyone.

parody (n.); 1590s (first recorded use in English is in Ben Jonson), “literary work in which the form and expression of dignified writing are closely imitated but are made ridiculous by the ludicrously inappropriate subject or methods; a travesty that follows closely the form and expression of the original,” from or in imitation of Latin parodia “parody,” from Greek parōidia “burlesque song or poem,” from para- “beside, parallel to” (see para- (1), in this case, “mock-”) + ōidē “song, ode” (see ode). The meaning “a poor or feeble imitation” is from 1830.

The one no less than the other belongs to Ideas, for Ideas no more have an inside than they do an outside (they are erewhons).

Proust did not write pastiches to raise a laugh. He was doing his homework, just as Schumann did when he composed variations on Bach.