A person could be immensely happy reading only him or the writers he loved. But that would be too easy.
I have hope in children. In children and warriors. In children who fuck like children and warriors who fight like brave men.
We all have to die a bit every now and then and usually it's so gradual that we end up more alive than ever. Infinitely old and infinitely alive.
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.
Argentina's like a novel, he said, a lie, or make-believe at best. Buenos Aires is full of crooks and loudmouths, a hellish place, with nothing to recommend it except the women, and some of the writers, but only a few. Ah, but the pampas—the pampas are eternal. A limitless cemetery, that's what they're like.
After that moment, reality for Pelletier and Espinoza seemed to tear like paper scenery, and when it was stripped away it revealed what was behind it: a smoking landscape, as if someone, an angel, maybe, was tending hundreds of barbecue pits for a crowd of invisible beings.
Tempus breve est, Ora et labora. We aren't given much time on this earth. We have to pray and work, not go pushing our luck with soccer pools.
I'm an educated man: the prisons I know are subtle ones. And of course poetry and prison have always been neighbors. And yet it's melancholia that's the source of my attraction.
I ate sitting in the kitchen in silence, thinking about future. I saw tornadoes, hurricanes, tidal waves, fire. Then I washed the frying pan, plate and silverware, brushed away the crumbs and unbolted the door to the courtyard. Before I left, I turned out the light.
Leave the book alone, pretend it doesn't exist, forget about it, said Amalfitano, you've never been interested in geometry.
Bright colours in the west, giant butterflies dancing as night crept like a cripple toward the east.
Every hundred feet the world changes.
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.
Images,wounds. That is all he can see. And the images are dissolving little by little, like the setting sun, leaving only the wounds.
Reading is never a waste of time.
Nothing is ever behind us.
The truth is we never stop being children, terrible children covered in sores and knotty veins and tumors and age spots, but ultimately children, in other words we never stop clinging to life because we are life.
The sickness is to sit at the base of the lighthouse staring into nothing. The lighthouse is black, the sea is black, the writer's jacket is also black.
These weren't comforting nights, much less pleasant ones, but Espinoza discovered two things that helped him mightily in the early days: he would never be a fiction writer, and, in his own way, he was brave.
For me, the word "writing" is the exact opposite of the word "waiting". Instead of waiting, there is writing.
People see what they want to see and what people want to see never has anything to do with the truth. People are cowards to the last breath. I'm telling you between you and me: the human being, broadly speaking, is the closest thing there is to a rat.
You run risks. That's the plain truth. You run risks and, even in the most unlikely places, you are subject to destiny's whims.
I enjoy vegetarian food like I enjoy a kick in the stomach.
He turned his back on the window, not knowing why he had gone to it, not knowing what he hoped to see, and just at that moment, when there was no one at the window any more and only a little lamp of colored glass at the back of the room flickering, it appeared.
Among them the nameless girl, with her guillotine mouth, strolling through the past and the future like a movie face.
Nothing good ever comes of love. What comes of love is always something better.
His name is Inaki Echevarne, we had a duel. A fight? I said. No, a duel. And who won? I don't know which of us killed the other, said Belano. Fantastic! I said. Yes, he said.
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.
Only great challenges make it worthwhile to pack up and move all one's books.
The world is alive and no living thing has any remedy. That's our fortune.
The pain, or the memory of pain, that here was literally sucked away by something nameless until only a void was left. The knowledge that this question was possible: pain that turns finally into emptiness. The knowledge that the same equation applied to everything, more or less.
Everything that begins as comedy ends as a comic monologue, but we aren't laughing anymore.
I began to tremble and he noticed. Why do I have to like the worst ones? I thought, why do I have to be attracted to the most brooding, least cultured, most desperate ones? It's a question I ask myself twice a year. I still haven't found an answer.
It's good to love. It's bad to be impressionable.
Ivanov's breath smelled of vodka and sewers, sour and heavy, like something rotting, reminiscent of empty houses near swamps, nightfall at four in the afternoon, vapors rising from the sickly grass and fogging the dark windows. A horror film, thought Ansky. Where everything has come to a halt, and it comes to a halt because it knows it's lost.
We play at believing ourselves imortal. We delude oursleves in the appraisal of our own works and in our perpetual misappraisal of the works of others. See you at the Nobel, writers say, as one might say: see you in hell.
To Amalfitano, Jordi seemed a shy and formal boy. Rosa liked his silence, which she mistook for thoughtfulness when it was really just a symptom of the confusion raging in his head.
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.
Her silence wasn't unpleasant, not did it imply resentment or sadness. It was transparent, not dense. It took up almost no space.
Then he sat on his bed and for a fraction of a second the shadows retreated and he had a fleeting glimpse of reality. He felt dizzy and he closed his eyes. Without knowing it he fell asleep.
One day I'll die of cancer.
Everything's over, I thought. I felt rested, I'm home, I have lots to do. When I sat up in bed, though, all I did was start to cry like a fool, for no apparent reason.
With every day that passes I am more convinced that the act of writing is a concious act of humility.
Being alone makes us stronger. That's the honest truth. But it's cold comfort, since even if I wanted company no one will come near me anymore.
And then the storm of shit begins.
They told me that Arturo Belano once gave a lecture at the Casa del Lago and when it was his turn to talk he forgot everything. I think the lecture was supposed to be on Chilean poetry and Belano improvised a talk about horror movies.
As far as Aricimboldi was concerned, Isou was a 'Romanian fuck-stick.
