…I realized my happiness was artificial. I felt happy because I saw the others were happy and because I knew I should feel happy, but I wasn’t really happy.
Nothing good ever comes of love. What comes of love is always something better
Books are finite, sexual encounters are finite, but the desire to read and to fuck is infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace.
I have hope in children. In children and warriors. In children who fuck like children and warriors who fight like brave men.
I am dying now, but I still have many things to say.
There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists.
Sólo la fiebre y la poesía provocan visiones. / Sólo el amor y la memoria. / No estos caminos ni estas llanuras. / No estos laberintos.
Write in the morning, revise in the afternoon, read at night, and spend the rest of your time exercising your diplomacy, stealth, and charm.
When people read his books they have an uncontrollable desire to hang the author in the town square. I can’t think of a higher honor for a writer.
The road to wealth is sown with false starts and failures that should in no way discourage the poor who make good or our neighbors with new found riches. We have to give it our all.
As time goes by, as time goes by, the whip-crack of the years, the precipice of illusions, the ravine that swallows up all human endeavour except the struggle to survive.
Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people’s ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.
That’s a pretty story,’ said Afanasievna as she let go of Ansky’s genitals. ‘A pity I’m too old and have seen to much to believe it.’It has nothing to do with belief,’ said Ansky, ‘it has to do with understanding, and then changing.
We’re artists too, but we do a good job hiding it, don’t we?
For her, reading was directly linked to pleasure, not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or verbal labyrinths…
Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people’s ideas, like listening to music (oh yes), like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.
You have to listen to women. You should never ignore a woman’s fears.
Younger than Morini and Pelletier, Espinoza studied Spanish literature, not German literature, at least for the first two years of his university career, among other sad reasons because he dreamed of being a writer.
You can woo a girl with a poem, but you can’t hold onto her with a poem. Not even with a poetry movement.
A person could be immensely happy reading only him or the writers he loved. But that would be too easy.
I didn’t hit her, man, what happened was that Maria was obsessed with the Marquis de Sade and wanted to try the spanking thing,” said Luscious Skin. “That’s very Maria,” said Pancho. “She takes her reading seriously.
His words saddened them greatly, though they couldn’t say why.
When you know something, you know it, and when you don’t, you’d better learn. And in the meantime, you should keep quiet, or at least speak only when what you say will advance the learning process.
All names disappear. Children should be taught that in elementary school. But we’re afraid to teach them.
If it was true that all effort led to a vast abyss, she had two recommendations to begin with, first, not to cheat people, and, second, to treat them properly. Beyond that, there was room for discussion.
I decided to tell the truth even if it meant being pointed at.
Does this mean that in some places I’m American and in some places I’m African American and in other places, by logical extension, I’m nobody?
So everything lets us down, including curiosity and honesty and what we love best. Yes, said the voice, but cheer up, it’s fun in the end.
The American mirror, said the voice, the sad American mirror of wealth and poverty and constant useless metamorphosis, the mirror that sails and whose sails are pain.
Then he went out without touching anything and put his arm around Ingeborg, and like that, with their arms around each other, they returned to the village while the whole past of the universe fell on their heads.
Listen: I don’t have anything against autobiographies, so long as the writer has a penis that’s twelve inches long when erect. So long as the writer is a woman who was once a whore and is moderately wealthy in her old age.
I started to think about the abyss that separates the poet from the reader and the next thing I knew I was deeply depressed.
Bright colours in the west, giant butterflies dancing as night crept like a cripple toward the east.
… the novel, arguably the author’s best, had a disquieting power, like a sleeping crocodile.
Posthumous: It sounds like the name of a Roman gladiator, an unconquered gladiator. At least that’s what poor Posthumous would like to believe. It gives him courage.
For a while, Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism vanishes and it’s the Readers who keep pace. The journey may be long or short.
If you’re going to say what you want to say, you’re going to hear what you don’t want to hear.
The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower.
Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.
No one knew what she was doing in Colonia Hidalgo, although it was most likely, according to the police, that she’d been taking a walk and had come upon death purely by chance.
Do you know what the worst thing about literature is? said Don Pancracio. I knew, but I pretended I didn’t. What? I said. That you end up being friends with writers. And friendship, treasure though it may be, destroys your critical sense.