If you sell, say, two thousand copies, it is the same thing as if you had sold nothing at all because two thousand is too vast – I mean, for the imagination to grasp. While thirty-seven people – perhaps thirty-seven are too many, perhaps seventeen would have been better or even seven – but still thirty-seven are still within the scope of one’s imagination.
Since then my loneliness does not pain me, because I know my redeemer lives and he will finally rise above the dust.
What eternity is to time, the Aleph is to space.
As we all know, there is a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition.
Little has happened to me in my lifetime, but I have read much.
The curious thing about The Ring and the Book, to which I will now return, is that although each character recounts the same events, and although there is no difference in what they tell, there is a fundamental difference, which belongs to the realm of human psychology, the fact that each of us believes we are justified. For example, the count admits he is a murderer, but the word “murderer” is too general. We know this from reading other books.
A circle drawn on a blackboard, a right triangle, a rhombus – all these are forms we can fully intuit; Ireneo could do the same with the stormy mane of a young colt, a small herd of cattle on a mountainside, a flickering fire and its uncountable ashes, and the many faces of a dead man at a wake. I have no idea how many stars he saw in the sky.
Poetry is given to the poet. I don’t think a poet can sit down at will and write. If he does, nothing worthwhile can come of it.
La derrota tiene una dignidad que la ruidosa victoria no merece.
Felices los amados y los amantes y los que pueden prescindir del amor. Felices los felices.
El ejecutor de una empresa atroz debe imaginar que ya la ha cumplido, debe imponerse un porvenir que sea irrevocable como el pasado.
The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms.
What is past is what is real.
I felt what we always feel when someone dies–the sad awareness, now futile, of how little it would have cost us to have been more loving. One forgets that one is a dead man conversing with dead men.
But I will relate what happened with absolute honesty; that, perhaps, will help me understand it. After all, when one confesses to an act, one ceases to be an actor in it and becomes its witness, becomes a man that observes and narrates it and no longer the man that performed it.
A classic book is a book which generations of men, driven by various reasons, read with that same initial fervor and that same mysterious loyalty.
Like all the men of Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, I have been a slave. I have known omnipotence, ignominy, imprisonment.
I reread these negative remarks and realize that I do not know whether music can despair of music or marble of marble. I do know that literature is an art that can foresee the time when it will be silenced, an art that can become inflamed with its own virtue, fall in love with its own decline, and court its own demise.
I’m alone and nobody is in the mirror.
Methodical writing distracts me from the present condition of men. But the certainty that everything has been already written nullifies or makes phantoms of us all.