Years of solitude had taught him that, in one’s memory, all days tend to be the same, but that there is not a day, not even in jail or in the hospital, which does not bring surprises, which is not a translucent network of minimal surprises.
I had no wish to take any determined route on that stroll; I attempted, rather, a maximum latitude of probabilities in order not to wear out expectation with an obligatory anticipation of a single one of them. I was able, within the imperfect limits of possibility, to walk, as they say, at random. I accepted, without any conscious prejudice but that of avoiding the wider avenues and streets, the most obscure invitations of chance.
There are countless men in the air, on land and at sea, and all that really happens happens to me.
I suspected once that any human life, however intricate and full it might be, consisted in reality of one moment: the moment when a man knows for all time who he is.
Words, words, words taken out of place and mutilated, words from other men – those were the alms left him by the hours and the centuries.
I have been Homer; shortly, I shall be No One, like Ulysses; shortly, I shall be all men; I shall be dead.
I always imagine them at nightfall, in the dusk of a slum or a vacant lot, in that long, quiet moment when things are gradually left alone, with their backs to the sunset, and when colors are like memories or premonitions of other colors. We must not be too prodigal with our angels; they are the last divinities we harbor, and they might fly away.
In the dream of the man that dreamed, the dreamed one awoke.
And I believe there was a rabbi who wrote that the Holy Scriptures were specifically destined, predestined, for each of its readers. That is, it has a different meaning if any of you read it or if I read it, or if it is read by men in the future or in the past.
I am not certain whether I ever believed in the City of the Immortals; I think the task of finding it was enough for me.
Sometimes I suspect that good readers are even blacker and rarer swans than good writers.
Lo que decimos pocas veces se parece a nosotros.
Por el amor, que nos deja ver a los otros como los ve la divinidad.
I would say, however, that romantic sentiment is a keen and pathetic sense of time, a few hours of amorous delight, the idea that everything passes away; a deeper sentiment for autumn, for twilight, for the passing nature of our own lives.
No one can read two thousand books. In the four hundred years I have lived, I’ve not read more than half a dozen.
There is no greater comfort than the idea that we have chosen our own misfortunes.
Like Whitman, Chesterton thought that the mere fact of existing is so prodigious that no misfortune should exempt us from a kind of cosmic gratitude.
Differing from Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not think of time as absolute and uniform. He believed it an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times.
I... confirm the fact – with a certain bittersweet melancholy – that everything in the world brings me back to a quotation or a book.
To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death.