Termite Art

"It sums up much of what a termite art aims at: buglike immersion in a small area without point or aim, and, over all, concentration on nailing down one moment without glamorizing it, but forgetting this accomplishment as soon as it has been passed; the feeling that all is expendable, that it can be chopped up and flung down in a different arrangment without ruin." (Manny Farber, Negative Space, p. 144)

Amras I

"Our watchfulness weighed upon our mood and constricted our understanding... We did not look out of the windows, but we heard enough sounds to be afraid... Our heads, when we stuck them into the open, were exposed to the vicious gusts of the foehn; the welter of air hardly left us room to breathe...  It was early March... We heard many birds and did not know what kind of birds... The waters of the Sill plunged into the depths before us and noisily separated us from Innsbruck, the city of our forebears, and this from the world that become so insufferable to us... (...) -we had always loved what came hard to us, despised what came easy- withdrawn ever more deeply into our raging heads, we padded our tower with grief." (Thomas Bernhard, Amras, p. 4) 

three monkeys

Keep going with Flaubert's Parrot:

"A week ago I saw a monkey in the street jump on a donkey and try to wank him off—the donkey brayed and kicked, the monkey's owner shouted, the monkey itself squealed—apart from two or three children who laughed and me who found it very funny, no one paid any attention. When I described this to M. Bellin, the secretary at the consulate, he told me of having seen an ostrich trying to rape a donkey. Max had himself wanked off the other day in a deserted section among some ruins and said it was very good."
Letter to Louis Bouilhet, Cairo, January 15th, 1850

flaubearing around

"When the Yakuts, a Siberian people, meet a bear, they doff their caps, greet him, call him master, old man or grandfather, and promise not to attack him or even speak ill of him. But if he looks as though he may pounce on them, they shoot at him, and if they kill him, they cut him in pieces and roast him and regale themselves, repeating all the while, 'It is the Russians who are eating you, not us.'" (Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot)