Bartleby Quotes

“Suicide creates his own society: to shut yourself off from other people in some dingy, rented box and stare, like Melville's Bartleby, day in and day out at the dead wall outside your window is in itself a rejection of the world which is said to be rejecting you. It is a way of saying, like Bartleby, 'I prefer not to' to every offer and every possibility, which is a condition no amount of social engineering will cure.”
― A. Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide

“I would prefer not to: this sentence speaks in the intimacy of our nights: negative preference, the negation that effaces preference and is effaced therein: the neutrality of that which is not among the things there are to do.”
― Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster

“If Bartleby is a new Messiah, he comes not, like Jesus, to redeem what was, but to save what was not. The Tartarus into which Bartleby, the new savior, descends is the deepest level of the Palace of Destinies, that whose sight Leibniz cannot tolerate, the world in which nothing is compossible with anything else, where "nothing exists rather than something.”
― Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy

“Ah, la felicidad busca la luz, por eso juzgamos que el mundo es alegre; pero el dolor se esconde en la soledad, por eso juzgamos que el dolor no existe.”
― Herman Melville, Bartleby y otros cuentos

“Me gustan mis fiestas de hombre solo. Son como la vida misma, como cualquier cuento de Felisberto Hernández: una fiesta incompleta, pero una fiesta de verdad.”
― Enrique Vila-Matas, Bartleby & Co.