The novels I prefer, are those that make you feel uneasy from the very first page.
I must, however, bear in mind that my every move to erase previous events provokes a rain of new events, which complicate the situation worse than before and which I will then, in their turn, have to try to erase.
When you’ve waited two hundred million years, you can also wait six hundred;.
Leave me like this. I have come full circle and I understand. The world must be read backward. All is clear.
Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.
Finito il turno Arturo torna a casa, alle volte un po’ dopo e alle volte un po’ prima che suoni la sveglia della moglie, Elide. Lei, stirandosi con “una specie di dolcezza pigra”, gli mette le braccia al collo, e dal suo giaccone capisce il tempo che fa fuori.
In museums I always enjoy stopping at the Saint Jeromes.
There: the white butterfly has crossed the whole valley, and from the reader’s book has flown here, to light on the page I am writing.
With cities, it is as if with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear.
And at the bottom of each of those eyes I lived, or rather another me lived, one of the images of me, and it encountered the image of her, the most faithful image of her, in that beyound which opens, past the semiliquid sphere of the irises, in the darkness of the pupils, the mirrored hall of retinas, in our true element which extends without shores, without boundaries.
Desires are already memories.
Her breast was young, the nipples rosy. Cosimo just grazed it with his lips, before Viola slid away over the branches as if she were flying, with him clambering after her, and that skirt of hers always in his face.
In an existence like mine forecasts could not be made: I never know what could happen to me in the next half hour, I can’t imagine a life all made up of minimal alternatives, carefully circumscribed, on which bets can be made: either this or that.
As soon as I set foot there, everything I had imagined was forgotten; Pyrrha had become what is Pyrrha; and I thought I had always known.
While the hemlock was being prepared, Socrates was learning a melody on the flute. “What use will that be to you?”, he was asked. “At least I will learn this melody before I die.
But already ships were vanishing over the horizon and I was left behind, in this world of ours full of responsibilities and will-o’-the-wisps.
Each second is a universe, the second I live is the second I live in.
All that can be done is for each of us to invent our own ideal library of our classics; and I would say that one half of it would consist of books we have read and that have meant something for us and the other half of books which we intend to read and which we suppose might mean something to us. We should also leave a section of empty spaces for surprises and chance discoveries.
Think what it would be like to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to cement, to plastic.
Renouncing things is less difficult than people believe: it’s all a matter of getting started. Once you’ve succeeded in dispensing with something you thought essential, you realize you can also do without something else, then without many other things. So here I am walking along this empty surface that is the world.