Essayists

"¿Cómo reconocer una obra de arte? ¿Cómo separarla, aunque sólo sea un momento, de su aparato crítico, de sus exégetas, de sus incansables plagiarios, de sus ninguneadores, de su final destino de soledad? Es fácil. Hay que traducirla."

"Those in power (even if it's only for a little while) known nothing about literature, all they care about is power. And I'll play the fool for my readers, if I feel like it, but never for the powerful."

"If I were to say what I really think I would be arrested or shut away in a lunatic asylum. Come on, I am sure that it would be the same for everyone."

"Literature was a vast minefield occupied by enemies, except for a few classic authors (just a few), and every day I had to walk through that minefield, where any false move could be fatal, with only the poems of Archilochus to guide me. It's like that for all young writers. There comes a time when you have no support, not even from friends, forget about mentors, and there's no one to give you a hand; publication, prizes, and grants are reserved for the others, the ones who said “Yes, sir,” over and over, or those who praised the literary mandarins, a never-ending horde distinguished only by their aptitude for discipline and punishment — nothing escapes them and they forgive nothing."

"The secret story is the one we'll never know, although we're living it from day to day, thinking we're alive, thinking we've got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn't matter. But every single damn thing matters! Only we don't realize. We just tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another, and we don't realize that's a lie."

"We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain."

"It's strange how things happen, Mauricio Silva, known as the Eye, always tried to escape from violence even at the risk of being considered a coward, but the violence, the real violence, can't be escaped, at least not by us, born in Latin America in the 1950s, those of us who were around twenty years old when Salvador Allende died."

"One day I heard that The Eye had left Mexico. I wasn't surprised that he hadn't said good-bye. The Eye never said good-bye to anyone. I never said good-bye to anyone either."

"That night when he went back to his hotel, he wept for his dead children and all the other castrated boys, for his own lost youth, for those who were young no longer and those who died young, for those who fought for Salvador Allende and those who were too scared to fight."

"I was imprisoned in Concepción for a few days and then realeased. They didn't torture me, as I had feared; they didn't even rob me. But they didn't give me anything to eat either, or any kind of covering for the night, so I had to rely on the goodwill of other prisoners, who shared their food with me. In the small hours I could hear them torturing others; I couldn't sleep and there was nothing to read except a magazine in English that someone had left behind. The only interesting article in it was about a house that had once belonged to Dylan Thomas. ... I got out of that hole thanks to a pair of detectives who had been at high school with me in Los Ángeles..."

"La literatura es un vasto bosque y las obras maestras son los lagos, los árboles inmensos o extrañísimos, las elocuentes flores preciosas o las escondidas grutas, pero un bosque también está compuesto por árboles comunes y corrientes, por yerbazales, por charcos, por plantas parásitas, por hongos y por florecillas silvestres."

"About happiness he said not a word, I suppose because he considered it something strictly private and perhaps, how shall I say, treacherous or elusive."

"Darling, Juan de Dios Martínez would say to her sometimes, sweetheart, love, and in the darkness she would tell him to be quiet and then suck every last drop from him- of semen? of his soul? of the little life he felt, at the time, remained to him? They made love, at her express request, in semidarkness."

"He began to think about semblance, as Ansky had discussed it in his notebook, and he began to think about himself. He felt free, as he never had in his life, and although malnourished and weak, he also felt the strength to prolong as far as possible this impulse toward freedom, toward sovereignty. And yet the possibility that it was all nothing but semblance troubled him. Semblance was an occupying force of reality, he said to himself, even the most extreme, borderline reality. It lived in people's souls and their actions, in willpower and in pain, in the way memories and priorities were ordered. Semblance proliferated in the salons of the industrialists and in the underworld. It set the rules, it rebelled against its own rules...it set new rules."

"More recent writers who have knocked me dead include Roberto Bolaño, Ruth Ozeki, Sabrina Vourvoulias, Isabel Quintero and N. K. Jemisin."

"Among the many acid pleasures of the work of Roberto Bolaño, who died at 50 in 2003, is his idea that culture, in particular literary culture, is a whore. In the face of political repression, upheaval and danger, writers continue to swoon over the written word, and this, for Bolaño, is the source both of nobility and of pitch-black humor. In his novel The Savage Detectives, two avid young Latino poets never lose faith in their rarefied art no matter the vicissitudes of life, age and politics. If they are sometimes ridiculous, they are always heroic. But what can it mean, he asks us and himself, in his dark, extraordinary, stinging novella By Night in Chile, that the intellectual elite can write poetry, paint and discuss the finer points of avant-garde theater as the junta tortures people in basements? The word has no national loyalty, no fundamental political bent; it's a genie that can be summoned by any would-be master. Part of Bolaño's genius is to ask, via ironies so sharp you can cut your hands on his pages, if we perhaps find a too-easy comfort in art, if we use it as anesthetic, excuse and hide-out in a world that is very busy doing very real things to very real human beings. Is it courageous to read Plato during a military coup or is it something else?"

"Who said literature has no real power to affect history? Not Bolaño — for him, literature is an unnervingly protean, amoral force with uncanny powers of self-invention, self-justification and self-mythification. The mythmakers, he suggests, certainly do matter."

"I still don’t want to accept that W. G. Sebald and Roberto Bolaño, working only yesterday, are gone today. They each published for only a decade before dying in their fifties, but not before expanding our idea of what a novel can be. Half of what’s published these days bears their marks, and so it’s impossible for me to think of writers working today without thinking first of them."

"The moment we "discover" a favorite writer is like our experience of a cataclysmic event — we can remember precisely where we were and what we were doing when it occurred... So I assume I'll always recall the doctor's waiting room where I opened a dimpled, out-of-date issue of The New Yorker and found Roberto Bolaño's story "Gómez Palacio." For the first time, I was glad the doctor was running late, so I could read the story twice, and still have a few minutes left over to consider the fact that I had just encountered something extraordinarily beautiful and (at least to me) entirely new."

"Reading Roberto Bolaño is like hearing the secret story, being shown the fabric of the particular, watching the tracks of art and life merge at the horizon and linger there like a dream from which we awake inspired to look more attentively at the world."

"Bolaño's narrative style is fragmented and loaded. It is also full of a strange kind of gallows humour, as we are swept along by stories that are invented and presented entirely convincingly, only to be suddenly brought up short by a reminder that this has not been done innocently."

"Bolaño has a laser eye and a frank, confessional first-person voice as relentless as it is irresistible. His "infra-realism" sears through the book's world-weary characters... Just behind the nervy, deadpan narrative a total breakdown perpetually looms... Bolaño's writing... is an incantation — against horror, against defeat, against oblivion..."

"By far the most inspiring talent from south of the border since the '70s. A Chilean who lived for years in Mexico and ultimately settled near Barcelona before he died in 2003 at age 50, Bolaño's oeuvre is slowly making its way into English... His hypnotizing style and restless approach to plot are at once refreshing and humbling."

"Descobri que a leitura é uma forma servil de sonhar. Se tenho de sonhar, porque não sonhar os meus próprios sonhos?"

"A essência do universo é a contradição."

"À dolorosa luz das grandes lâmpadas eléctricas da fábrica Tenho febre e escrevo. Escrevo rangendo os dentes, fera para a beleza disto, Para a beleza disto totalmente desconhecida dos antigos.'Ó rodas, ó engrenagens, r-r-r-r-r-r-r eterno! Forte espasmo retido dos maquinismos em fúria! Em fúria fora e dentro de mim, Por todos os meus nervos dissecados fora, Por todas as papilas fora de tudo com que eu sinto! Tenho os lábios secos, ó grandes ruídos modernos, De vos ouvir demasiadamente de perto, E arde-me a cabeça de vos querer cantar com um excesso De expressão de todas as minhas sensações, Com um excesso contemporâneo de vós, ó máquinas!"

"Todo o homem que merece ser célebre sabe que não vale a pena sê-lo."

"Se, depois de eu morrer, quiserem escrever a minha biografia, Não há nada mais simples. Tem só duas datas—a da minha nascença e a da minha morte. Entre uma e outra coisa todos os dias são meus."

"Ah, poder ser tu, sendo eu! Ter a tua alegre inconsciência, E a consciência disso!"

"Não tenho ambições nem desejos Ser poeta não é uma ambição minha É a minha maneira de estar sozinho."

"Sejamos simples e calmos, Como os regatos e as árvores, E Deus amar-nos-á fazendo de nós Belos como as árvores e os regatos, E dar-nos-á verdor na sua primavera, E um rio aonde ir ter quando acabemos... E não nos dará mais nada, porque dar-nos mais seria tirar-nos mais."

"Sou um guardador de rebanhos. O rebanho é os meus pensamentos E os meus pensamentos são todos sensações. Penso com os olhos e com os ouvidos E com as mãos e os pés E com o nariz e a boca. Pensar uma flor é vê-la e cheirá-la E comer um fruto é saber-lhe o sentido.'Por isso quando num dia de calor Me sinto triste de gozá-lo tanto, E me deito ao comprido na erva, E fecho os olhos quentes, Sinto todo o meu corpo deitado na realidade, Sei a verdade e sou feliz."

"O único sentido oculto das coisas É elas não terem sentido oculto nenhum, É mais estranho do que todas as estranhezas E do que os sonhos de todos os poetas E os pensamentos de todos os filósofos, Que as coisas sejam realmente o que parecem ser E não haja nada que compreender. Sim, eis o que os meus sentidos aprenderam sozinhos:— As coisas não têm significação: têm existência. As coisas são o único sentido oculto das coisas."

"Fingir é conhecer-se."

"Não sou nada. Nunca serei nada. Não posso querer ser nada. À parte isso, tenho em mim todos os sonhos do mundo."

"(Come chocolates, pequena; Come chocolates! Olha que não há mais metafísica no mundo senão chocolates. Olha que as religiões todas não ensinam mais que a confeitaria. Come, pequena suja, come! Pudesse eu comer chocolates com a mesma verdade com que comes! Mas eu penso e, ao tirar o papel de prata, que é de folhas de estanho, Deito tudo para o chão, como tenho deitado a vida.)"

"A metafísica é uma consequência de estar mal disposto."

"Ah a frescura na face de não cumprir um dever! Faltar é positivamente estar no campo! Que refúgio o não se poder ter confiança em nós! Respiro melhor agora que passaram as horas dos encontros, Faltei a todos, com uma deliberação do desleixo, Fiquei esperando a vontade de ir para lá, que'eu saberia que não vinha. Sou livre, contra a sociedade organizada e vestida. Estou nu, e mergulho na água da minha imaginação. E tarde para eu estar em qualquer dos dois pontos onde estaria à mesma hora, Deliberadamente à mesma hora... Está bem, ficarei aqui sonhando versos e sorrindo em itálico. É tão engraçada esta parte assistente da vida! Até não consigo acender o cigarro seguinte... Se é um gesto, Fique com os outros, que me esperam, no desencontro que é a vida."

"A morte é a curva da estrada, Morrer é só não ser visto. Se escuto, eu te oiço a passada Existir como eu existo.'A terra é feita de céu. A mentira não tem ninho. Nunca ninguém se perdeu. Tudo é verdade e caminho."

"O poeta é um fingidor. Finge tão completamente Que chega a fingir que é dor A dor que deveras sente."

"Para ser grande, sê inteiro: nada Teu exagera ou exclui. Sê todo em cada coisa. Põe quanto és No mínimo que fazes. Assim em cada lago a lua toda Brilha, porque alta vive."

"Vem sentar-te comigo, Lídia, à beira do rio. Sossegadamente fitemos o seu curso e aprendamos Que a vida passa, e não estamos de mãos enlaçadas. (Enlacemos as mãos) ..... Desenlacemos as mãos, porque não vale a pena cansarmo-nos. Quer gozemos, quer não gozemos, passamos como o rio. Mais vale saber passar silenciosamente E sem desassossegos grandes."

"O meu coração é um pouco maior que o universo inteiro."

"O amor é que é essencial. O sexo é só um acidente."

"Sê plural como o universo!"

"O coração, se pudesse pensar, pararia."

"O meu passado é tudo quanto não consegui ser."

"Não há nenhuma ideia inteligente que possa ganhar aceitação geral sem ser misturada antes com um pouco de estupidez."

"Nunca amamos ninguém. Amamos, tão-somente, a ideia que fazemos de alguém. É a um conceito nosso – em suma, é a nós mesmos – que amamos."

"A literatura é a maneira mais agradável de ignorar a vida."

"Repudiei sempre que me compreendessem. Ser compreendido é prostituir-se. Prefiro ser tomado a sério como o que não sou, ignorado humanamente, com decência e naturalidade."

"Os sentimentos que mais doem, as emoções que mais pungem, são os que são absurdos – a ânsia de coisas impossíveis, precisamente porque são impossíveis, a saudade do que nunca houve, o desejo do que poderia ter sido, a mágoa de não ser outro, a insatisfação da existência do mundo. Todos estes meios tons da consciencia da alma criam em nós uma paisagem dolorida, um eterno sol-pôr do que somos."

"A liberdade é a possibilidade do isolamento... Se te é impossível viver só, nasceste escravo."

"Começo a conhecer-me. Não existo. Sou o intervalo entre o que desejo ser e os outros me fizeram."

"I know not what tomorrow will bring"

"The Gods sell when they give. Glory is paid for with disgrace. Poor are the happy, for they are Just what passes."

"Myth is the nothing that is everything."

"All beginnings are involuntary."

"Against destiny I fulfilled my duty . Uselessly? No, for I fulfilled it."

"Clear in thinking, and clear in feeling, and clear in wanting"

"Faithful to the word given and the idea had. All else is up to God!"

"Without madness what is man more than the healthy beast, corpse adjourned that procreates?"

"God wills, man dreams, the work is born."

"The sea is fulfilled, and the Empire fell apart. Lord, Portugal must yet fulfill itself!"

"The sea with an end can be Greek or Roman: the endless sea is Portuguese."

"The blighter that is at the end of the sea On the pitch-black night raised itself flying; Round the vessel it flew three times, Three times it flew creaking, And said, 'Who dared pierce Into my dens that I do not reveal, My black ceilings of the end of the world?' And the helmsman said, trembling, 'His Majesty King John the Second!Whose sails are these then which I rub against? Whose the keels I see and hear?' Said the blighter, and rolled three times, Three times it rolled filthy and bulky, 'Who attempts what is solely my power, I who abide where no one ever could see me And who drip the fears of the depthless sea?' And the helmsman trembled, and said, 'His Majesty King John the Second!'Three times he raised his hands from the helm, Three times he had them rooted on the helm, And said after trembling three times, 'Here at the helm I am more than myself: I am a People who wants the sea that is yours; And more than the blighter, that my soul fears And rolls on the darkness of the end of the world, Orders the will, that ties me at the helm, Of His Majesty King John the Second!'"

"Here lies, on the small farthest beach, the Captain of the End."

"Oh salty sea, how much of your salt are tears of Portugal!"

"Was it worthwhile? Everything is worthwhile if the soul is not small."

"Who wants to go beyond the Bojador Must go beyond pain."

"God gave the sea the danger and the abyss, but it was in it that He mirrored the sky."

"Pity him who lives at home Happy with his life, Without a dream, a flexing of wings, To make him relinquish Even the warmest ember of his hearth!Pity him who is happy! He lives because life lasts. Nothing within him whispers More than the primeval law: That life leads to the grave."

"These are Fortunate Islands, These are lands without a place"

"Oh Portugal, today you are fog... The Hour has come!"

"He looked about thirty, thin, rather above average height, exaggeratedly bent over when seated but less so when he stood up, dressed with a certain negligence, which was not entirely negligence. On his pale, uninteresting face an air of suffering did not stir interest, although it was difficult to define what kind of suffering that air — it seemed to suggest several kinds: privation, anguish, and a suffering born from the indifference of having suffered a great deal."

"Walking on these streets, until the night falls, my life feels to me like the life they have. By day they’re full of meaningless activity; by night, they’re full of meaningless lack of it. By day I am nothing, and by night I am I. There is no difference between me and these streets, save they being streets and I a soul, which perhaps is irrelevant when we consider the essence of things."

"Whether or not they exist, we're slaves to the gods."

"… And I, who timidly hate life, fear death with fascination. I fear this nothingness that could be something else, and I fear it as nothing and as something else simultaneously, as if gross horror and non-existence could coincide there, as if my coffin could entrap the eternal breathing of a bodily soul, as if immortality could be tormented by confinement. The idea of hell, which only a satanic soul could have invented seems to me to have derived from this sort of confusion - a mixture of two different fears that contradict and contaminate each other."

"I think of life as an inn where I have to stay until the abyss coach arrives. I don't know where it will take me, for I know nothing."

"Every day things happen in the world that cannot be explained by any law of things we know. Every day they're mentioned and forgotten, and the same mystery that brought them takes them away, transforming their secret into oblivion. Such is the law by which things that can't be explained must be forgotten. The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows."

"Having touched Christ's feet is not an excuse for punctuation mistakes."

"Strength without agility is a mere mass."

"There are those that even God exploits, and they are prophets and saints in the vacuousness of the world."

"I come closer to my desk as to a bulwark against life."

"We are two abysses — a well staring at the sky."

"A tedium that includes only the anticipation of more tedium; the regret, now, of tomorrow regretting having regretted today."

"The train slows down, it's the Cais do Sodré. I arrived to Lisbon, but not to a conclusion."

"We become sphynxes, though fake, up to the point we no longer know who we are."

"Fraternity has subtleties."

"I believe that saying a thing is to keep its virtues and take away its terror."

"I have now so many fundamental thoughts, so many really metaphysical things to say, that I suddenly get tired and decide not to write more, not to think more, but allow the fever of saying to make me sleepy, and fondle, with closed eyes, as if to a cat, all that I could have said."

"I'm all those things, even though I don't want to, in the confuse depth of my fatal sensibility."

"I sleep and I unsleep. On the other side of me, beyond where I lie down, the silence of the house touches infinity. I hear time falling, drop by drop, and no falling drop is heard falling."

"The house clock, place certain there at the bottom of things, strikes the half hour dry and null. All is so much, all is so deep, all is so dark and cold!"

"I pass times, I pass silences, formless worlds pass me by."

"Everything was asleep as if the universe was a mistake."

"Not pleasure, not glory, not power: freedom, only freedom."

"Changing from the ghosts of faith to the spectres of reason is just changing cells."

"Thing thrown to a corner, rag fallen on the road, my ignoble being feigns itself in front of life."

"It was just a moment, and I saw myself. Then I no longer could say what I was."

"As we wash our body so we should wash destiny, change life as we change clothes."

"There's a tiredness of abstract intelligence, and it's the most horrible of tirednesses. It doesn't weight on you like the tiredness of the body, nor does it worry you like the tiredness of knowledge and emotion. It's a weightiness of the conscience of the world, an inability of the soul to breathe."

"Then a overflowing desire comes to me, absurd, of a sort of satanism before Satan, in that one day [...] an escape out of God can be found and the deepest of us stops, I don't know how, to be a part of being or not being."

"To stagnate in the sun, goldenly, like an obscure lake surrounded by flowers."

"For I am the size of what I see not my height's size."

"In order to understand, I destroyed myself."

"Solitude desolates me; company oppresses me."

"Yes, talking to people makes me sleepy."

"The idea of any social obligation [...] just the idea of it embarasses my thoughts for a day, and sometimes it's since the day before that I worry, and don't sleep well, and the real affair, when it happens, is absolutely insignificant and justifies nothing; and the case repeats itself and I never learn to learn."

"The beauty of a naked body is felt only by the dressed races."

"What is a disease is wishing with an equal intensity what is needed and what is desirable, and suffer for not being perfect as you would suffer for not having bread. The romantic error is this wanting the moon as if there was a way to get it."

"I take with me the conscience of defeat as a victory banner."

"It is noble to be shy, illustrious not to know how to act, great not to have a gift for living."

"Blessed are those who never entrust their life to no one."

"Everyone has his vanity, and each one's vanity is his forgetting that there are others with an equal soul."

"I reread? I lied! I don't dare to reread. I cannot reread. What's the point, for me, in rereading?"

"Civilization consists in giving something an unfitting name, then dream about the result. And indeed the false name and the real dream create a new reality. The object really becomes another, because we turned it into another one. We manufacture realities."

"The consciousness of life's unconsciousness is intelligence's oldest tax."

"A sort of anteneurosis of what I will be when I will not longer be freezes my body and soul. A kind of remembrance of my future death makes me shudder from the inside."

"What, I believe, produces in me the deep feeling, in which I live, of incongruity with others, is that most think with sensitivity, while I feel with thought."

"You breathe better when you're rich."

"I never go to where's a risk. I'm frightened of dangers down to boredom."

"Some sensations are sleeps that take up all the extent of the mind like a fog, don't let us think, don't let us act, don't let us be clearly."

"My joy is as painful as my pain."

"Between me and life is a faint glass. No matter how sharply I see and understand life, I cannot touch it."

"My dreams are a stupid refuge, like an umbrella against a thunderbolt."

"My life is as if you've hit me with it."

"If we knew the truth, we'd see it; all else is system and outskirts."

"They bring me faith like a closed package in someone else's plate. They want me to accept it so that I don't open it."

"The superiority of the dreamer is that dreaming is much more practical than living, and that the dreamer extracts from life a much vaster and varied pleasure than the action man. In better and more direct words, the dreamer is the real action man."

"I never meant to be but a dreamer."

"There's no regret more painful than the regret of things that never were."

"I always live in the present. The future I can't know. The past I no longer have."

"The supreme empire is that of the Emperor who renounces all normal life, that of other men, and in who the care of supremacy doesn't weigh like a load of jewels."

"I will be what I want. But I will have to want what I'll be. Success is in having success, not conditions for success."

"To act is to rest."

"All problems are unsolvable. The essence of the existence of a problem is that there is no solution. Looking for a fact means there is no fact. To think is not to know how to be."

"His livid face is a bewildered false green. I notice it, between the chest's hard air, with the fraternity of knowing I will also be so."

"We never love someone. We just love the idea we have of someone. It's a concept of ours - summing up, ourselves - that we love."

"To write is to forget. Literature is the pleasantest way of ignoring life."

"Being pleased with what they give you is proper of slaves. Asking for more is proper of children. Conquering more is proper of fools."

"To be understood is to prostitute yourself."

"I search and can't find myself. I belong in chrysanthemum time, sharp in calla lily elongations. God made my soul into an ornamental thing."

"'Any road', said Carlyle, 'even this road to Entepfuhl, will take you to the end of the world'. But the Entepfuhl road, if taken in its entirety, and to the end, goes back to Entepfuhl; so Entepfuhl, where we already were, is that very end of the world we were seeking."

"It's been a long time since I've been me."

"Inside the henhouse from where he will be taken to be killed, the cock sings hymns to liberty because he was given two perches."

"What's most worthless about dreams is that everybody has them."

"The end is low, like all quantitative ends, personal or not, and it can be attained and verified."

"The perfect man of pagans was the perfection of the man there is; the perfect man of christians, the perfection of the man there isn't; the buddhists' perfect man, the perfection of not existing a man."

"Nature is the difference between the soul and God."

"There is no safe standard to tell man from animals."

"Irony is the first hint that consciousness became conscious."

"Who am I to myself? Just a feeling of mine."

"I will necessarily say what it seems to me, given that I'm me."

"Direct experience is the evasion, or hiding place of those devoid of imagination."

"Action men are the unvoluntary slaves of wise men."

"To narrate is to create, for living is just being lived."

"I never cared about whatever tragic event happened in China. It's faraway decoration, even if in blood and plague."

"The slope takes you to the windmill, but effort takes you nowhere."

"Destiny gave me only two things: a few accounting books and the gift of dreaming."

"In today's life, the world belongs only to the stupid, the insensitive and the agitated. The right to live and triumph is now conquered almost by the same means by which you conquer internment in an asylum: the inability to think, amorality and hiperexcitation."

"What is art but the denial of life?"

"Common man, no matter how hard life is to him, at least has the fortune of not thinking it."

"To think is to destroy. The very process of thought indicates it for the same thought, as thinking is decomposing."

"I sometimes think, with a sad delight, that if one day, in a future I no longer belong to, these sentences, that I write, last with praise, I will at last have the people who understand me, those mine, the true family to be born in and be loved. [...] I will only be understood in effigy, when affection no longer repays the dead the unaffection that was, when living."

"Enthusiasm is rude."

"My God, my God, who am I attending to? How many am I? Who is me? What is this interval between me and me?"

"Being a retired major looks like an ideal thing to me. What a pity you couldn't eternally have been just a retired major."

"My curiosity sister of larks."

"If a man can only write well when drunk, I'll tell him: get drunk. And if he tells me that his liver suffers with it, I'll answer: what's your liver? It's a dead thing that lives as long as you live, and the poems you'll write will live without a as long as."

"My homeland is the portuguese language."

"Art consists in making others feel what we feel."

"Art lies because it's social."

"Tedium is the lack of a mithology. To whom has no beliefs, even doubt is impossible, even skepticism has no strength to suspect."

"Smell is a strange sight. It evokes sentimental landscapes through a sudden sketching of the subconscious."

"Deceiving himself well is the first quality of the statesman."

"It's certain that, when hearing from any of those people the story of their sexual marathons, a vague suspicion pervades us, at about the seventh deflowering."

"Liberty is the possibility of isolation."

"If you cannot live alone, you were born a slave."

"And let our despite go to those who work and fight and our hate to those who hope and trust."

"We adore perfection because we can't have it; it would disgust us if we had it. Perfect is inhuman, because human is imperfect."

"If I had written King Lear, I would regret it all my life afterwards. Because that work is so big, that its defects show as huge, its monstrous defects, things even minimal in between some scenes and their possible perfection. It's not the sun with spots; it's a broken greek statue."

"For valuing your own suffering sets on it the gold of a sun of pride. Suffering a lot can originate the illusion of being the Chosen of Pain."

"Everything is absurd."

"The world belongs to who doesn't feel. The primary condition to be a practical man is the absence of sensitivity."

"What would happen to the world if we were human?"

"Who doesn't feel commands. He who only thinks what is required in order to win, wins."

"Sailing is necessary, living is not necessary."

"All pleasure is a vice, for seeking pleasure is what everybody does in life, and the only dark vice is doing what everybody does."

"I'm upset by the happiness of all these men who don't know they're unhappy. [...] Because of that, though, I love them all. Dear vegetables!"

"For the moment being, given that we live in society, the only duty of superior men is to reduce to a minimum their participation in the tribe's life. Not to read newspapers, or read them only to know about whatever unimportant and curious is going on. [...] The supreme honorable state for a superior man is in not knowing who is the Head of State of his country, or if he lives under a monarchy or a republic. All his attitude must be setting his soul so that the passing of things, of events doesn't bother him. If he doesn't do it he will have to take an interest in others in order to take care of himself."

"Wasting time has an esthetics to it."

"I never was but an isolated bon vivant, which is absurd; or a mystic bon vivant, which is an impossible thing."

"It's in an inland sea that the river of my life ended."

"Every gesture is a revolutionary act."

"Knowing not to have illusions is absolutely necessary in order to have dreams."

"Why is art beautiful? Because it's useless. Why is life ugly? Because it's all ends and purposes and intentions."

"And the supreme glory of all this, my love, is to think that maybe this isn't true, neither may I believe it true.And when lying starts giving us pleasure, let's speak the truth so that we lie to it."

"My head and the universe ache me."

"Yet I have no stylistic nobility. My head aches because my head aches. The universe aches me because my head aches."

"Given that we cannot know all the elements in a problem, we never can solve it."

"I don't believe in the landscape."

"I say it because I don't believe."

"When I write, I solemnly visit myself."

"Life is a thread that someone entangled."

"They were two and beautiful and wanted to be something else; love delayed itself to them in the tedium of the future, and regret of what would happen to be was already being the daughter of the love they hadn't had."

"Only sterility is noble and dignified. Only killing what never was is elevated and perverse and absurd."

"I exempt you of being present in my idea of you."

"That's not my love; that's just your life."

"And as well as I dream, I reason if I want, for that's just another kind of dream."

"There is no happiness without knowledge. But knowledge of happiness is unhappy; for knowing ourselves happy is knowing ourselves passing through happiness, and having to, immediatly at once, leave it behind. To know is to kill, in happiness as in everything. Not to know, though, is not to exist."

"I don't write in Portuguese. I write myself."

"To travel? In order to travel it's enough to be. [...] Why travel? In Madrid, in Berlin, in Persia, in China, at the Poles both, where would I be but in myself, and in the sort and kind of my sensations?Life is what we make of it. Travels are travellers. What we see is not what we see but what we are."

"I'd like to be in the country so that I'd could like being in the city."

"Man shouldn't be able to see his own face. That's what's most terrible. Nature gave him the possibility of not seeing it, as well as the incapacity of not seeing his own eyes."

"In any spirit that isn't deformed there is the belief in God. In any spirit that is not deformed there isn't the belief in a particular God."

"I'm a man for whom the outside world is an inner reality."

"Humanitarianism is rude."

"Property isn't theft: it's nothing."

"To have defined and sure opinions, fixed and known instincts, passions and character — all that is the horror of turning our soul into a fact, materialize it and make it external."

"We’ve been devastated by the severest and deadliest drought in history – that of our profound awareness of the futility of all effort and the vanity of all plans."

"Since I wasn’t able to leave a succession of beautiful lies, I want to leave the smidgen of truth that the falsehood of everything lets us suppose we can tell."

"These pages are not my confession; they’re my definition. And I feel, as I begin to write it, that I can write it with some semblance of truth."

"There's no greater tragedy than an equal intensity, in the same soul or the same man, of the intellectual sentiment and the moral sentiment. For a man to be utterly and absolutely moral, he has to be a bit stupid. For a man to be absolutely intellectual, he has to be a bit immoral."

"I'm going to end a life that I thought could contain every kind of greatness but that in fact consisted only of my incapacity to really want to be great. Whenever I arrived at a certainty, I remembered that those with the greatest certainties are lunatics."

"Attention to detail and a perfectionist instinct, far from stimulating action, are character qualities that lead to renunciation. Better to dream than to be."

"I belong to a generation - assuming that this generation includes others besides me - that lost its faith in the gods of the old religions as well as in the gods of modern nonreligions. I reject Jehova as I reject humanity."

"At first I felt dizzy - not with the kind of dizziness that makes the body reel but the kind that's like a dead emptiness in the brain, an instinctive awareness of the void."

"Our problem isn't that we're individualists. It's that our individualism is static rather than dynamic. We value what we think rather than what we do. We forget that we haven't done, or been, what we thought; that the first function of life is action, just as the first property of things is motion."

"Imagine if, some day back in the 1950s, an American poet named John Ashbery had not only written a few of his own highly original poems, but in an ecstasy of creative surfeit, had invented three other poets — Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara and James Schuyler — and then, over the years, proceeded to write poems as them, even entire books. It sounds fantastic, but it is what Pessoa actually did. Nor was it just a whimsical creative exercise. In The Western Canon, that ultimate literary proving ground, Harold Bloom named Caiero and de Campos as "great poets" in their own right."

"The amazing Portuguese poet... as a fantastic invention surpasses any creation by Borges... Pessoa was neither mad nor a mere ironist; he is Whitman reborn, but a Whitman who gives separate names to "my self," "the real me" or "me myself," and "my soul," and writes wonderful books of poetry for all of them."

"Fernando Pessoa is the extreme example of what may be the essentially modern kind of poet: the objective introvert. None has more consistently tried to find his real self with its multiplicity intact and to keep his poems impersonal. He accepted the dividedness of a human self so completely that he did something unique: wrote poetry under four names – his own and three 'heteronyms'. Not pseudonyms: they are imaginary poets with real poems in them. Fernando Pessoa was four poets in one: Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Alvaro de Campos and himself; each strongly distinct from the others. One is soon struck by an external difference between their poems..."

"Pessoa was a poet who wrote poets as well as poems."

"Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) is one of the great originals of modern European poetry and Portugal's premier modernist. He is also a strange and original writer. Other modernists—Yeats, Pound, Eliot—invented masks through which to speak occasionally, from Michael Robartes to Hugh Selywn Mauberly to J. Alfred Prufock. Pessoa invented whole poets."

"Pessoa's writing, the whole of his extraordinary opus, a major presence in what has come to be known as "modernism" in the European languages... Almost any commentary of any length on Pessoa's writings, sensibility, and imagination is bound to convey a glimpse, at least, of its intensity and elusiveness, its apparently endlessly unfolding hall of mirrors."

"Nada en su vida es sorprendente — nada, excepto sus poemas."

"The man who never was."

"Fernando Pessoa is the least known of the masters of twentieth-century poetry. From his heteronymic passion he produced, if that is the word, two of our greatest poets. Alberto Caeiro and Álvaro de Campos, and a third, Ricardo Reis, who isn't bad. Pessoa is the exemplary poet of the self as other, of the poem as testament to unreality, proclamation of nothingness, occasion for expectancy."

"Fernando Pessoa is the greatest Portuguese poet since Camões, and one of the most complex and astonishing figures of 20th-century literature."

"Pessoa would be Shakespeare if all that we had of Shakespeare were the soliloquies of Hamlet, Falstaff, Othello and Lear and the sonnets. His legacy is a set of explorations, in poetic form, of what it means to inhabit a human consciousness... What makes Pessoa's thought and poetry compelling is not that he picks up and develops the forms and themes of Whitman and Emerson and retransmits our patrimony back to us—though this would be marvelous—but because in the poems and prose he has passed a judgment upon the 20th century rejection of individualism."

"The most profound poet of the twentieth century."

"[Pessoa was] Portugal's greatest writer of the twentieth century [though] some critics would even leave off that last qualifying phrase. [He was] one of the most appealing European modernists, equal in command and range to his contemporaries Rilke and Mandelstam."

"[Pessoa] is the modernist's modernist: an inspired amalgam of Lewis Carroll, Aristophanes, Erasmus, Voltaire (& Co., if you will), whose exquisite mixed praises of human and literary folly create a polyphony unlike any other prose music you've ever heard."

"Eloquent, volatile and obsessed with life – and death – [his] poems place [him] among the modernist giants in whose shadow we live and who made our century one of extraordinary poetic richness."

"The person attempting to travel two roads at once will get nowhere."

"In order to properly understand the big picture, everyone should fear becoming mentally clouded and obsessed with one small section of truth."

"Human nature is evil, and goodness is caused by intentional activity."

"Not having heard of it is not as good as having heard of it. Having heard of it is not as good as having seen it. Having seen it is not as good as knowing it. Knowing it is not as good as putting it into practice. Learning arrives at putting it into practice and then stops."

"Learning proceeds until death and only then does it stop. ... Its purpose cannot be given up for even a moment. To pursue it is to be human, to give it up to be a beast."

"The learning of the gentleman enters through his ears, fastens to his heart, spreads through his four limbs, and manifests itself in his actions. ... The learning of the petty person enters through his ears and passes out his mouth. From mouth to ears is only four inches—how could it be enough to improve a whole body much larger than that?"

"The gentleman knows that whatever is imperfect and unrefined does not deserve praise. ... He makes his eyes not want to see what is not right, makes his ears not want to hear what is not right, makes his mouth not want to speak what is not right, and makes his heart not want to deliberate over what is not right. ... For this reason, power and profit cannot sway him, the masses cannot shift him, and nothing in the world can shake him."

"One whose intentions and thoughts are cultivated will disregard wealth and nobility. One whose greatest concern is for the Way and righteousness will take lightly kings and dukes. It is simply that when one examines oneself on the inside, external goods carry little weight. A saying goes, "The gentleman makes things his servants. The petty man is servant to things.""

"If an action ... involves little profit but much righteousness, do it."

"Human nature is evil; its goodness derives from conscious activity. Now it is human nature to be born with a fondness for profit. Indulging this leads to contention and strife, and the sense of modesty and yielding with which one was born disappears. One is born with feelings of envy and hate, and, by indulging these, one is led into banditry and theft, so that the sense of loyalty and good faith with which he was born disappears. One is born with the desires of the ears and eyes and with a fondness for beautiful sights and sounds, and, by indulging these, one is led to licentiousness and chaos, so that the sense of ritual, rightness, refinement, and principle with which one was born is lost. Hence, following human nature and indulging human emotions will inevitably lead to contention and strife, causing one to rebel against one’s proper duty, reduce principle to chaos, and revert to violence. Therefore one must be transformed by the example of a teacher and guided by the way of ritual and rightness before one will attain modesty and yielding, accord with refinement and ritual, and return to order."

"A person who is transformed by the instructions of a teacher, devotes himself to study, and abides by ritual and rightness may become a noble person, while one who follows his nature and emotions, is content to give free play to his passions, and abandons ritual and rightness is a lesser person."

"A questioner asks: If human nature is evil, then where do ritual and rightness come from? I reply: ritual and rightness are always created by the conscious activity of the sages."

"A person who is shallow aspires to depth; one who is ugly aspires to beauty; one who is narrow aspires to breadth; one who is poor aspires to wealth; one who is humble aspires to esteem. Whatever one lacks in oneself he must seek outside."

"The straightening board was created because of warped wood, and the plumb line came into being because of things that are not straight. Rulers are established and ritual and rightness are illuminated because the nature is evil."

"Valour, however unfortunate, commands great respect even from enemies: but the Romans despise cowardice, even though it be prosperous."

"Perseverance is more prevailing than violence; and many things which cannot be overcome when they are together, yield themselves up when taken little by little."

"Authority and place demonstrate and try the tempers of men, by moving every passion and discovering every frailty."

"Be ruled by time, the wisest counsellor of all."

"Ἡ ἀνάπαυσις τῶν πόνων ἐστὶν ἄρτυμα."

"The great god Pan is dead."

"He is a fool who lets slip a bird in the hand for a bird in the bush."

"The mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting."

"Scilurus on his death-bed, being about to leave four-score sons surviving, offered a bundle of darts to each of them, and bade them break them. When all refused, drawing out one by one, he easily broke them,—thus teaching them that if they held together, they would continue strong; but if they fell out and were divided, they would become weak."

"Dionysius the Elder, being asked whether he was at leisure, he replied, "God forbid that it should ever befall me!""

"A prating barber asked Archelaus how he would be trimmed. He answered, "In silence.""

"When Philip had news brought him of divers and eminent successes in one day, "O Fortune!" said he, "for all these so great kindnesses do me some small mischief.""

"There were two brothers called Both and Either; perceiving Either was a good, understanding, busy fellow, and Both a silly fellow and good for little, Philip said, "Either is both, and Both is neither.""

"Philip being arbitrator betwixt two wicked persons, he commanded one to fly out of Macedonia and the other to pursue him."

"Being about to pitch his camp in a likely place, and hearing there was no hay to be had for the cattle, "What a life," said he, "is ours, since we must live according to the convenience of asses!""

"These Macedonians," said he, "are a rude and clownish people, that call a spade a spade."

"He made one of Antipater's recommendation a judge; and perceiving afterwards that his hair and beard were coloured, he removed him, saying, "I could not think one that was faithless in his hair could be trusty in his deeds.""

"Being nimble and light-footed, his father encouraged him to run in the Olympic race. "Yes," said he, "if there were any kings there to run with me.""

"When Darius offered him ten thousand talents, and to divide Asia equally with him, "I would accept it," said Parmenio, "were I Alexander." "And so truly would I," said Alexander, "if I were Parmenio." But he answered Darius that the earth could not bear two suns, nor Asia two kings."

"When he was wounded with an arrow in the ankle, and many ran to him that were wont to call him a god, he said smiling, "That is blood, as you see, and not, as Homer saith, ‘such humour as distils from blessed gods.'""

"Aristodemus, a friend of Antigonus, supposed to be a cook's son, advised him to moderate his gifts and expenses. "Thy words," said he, "Aristodemus, smell of the apron.""

"Thrasyllus the Cynic begged a drachm of Antigonus. "That," said he, "is too little for a king to give." "Why, then," said the other, "give me a talent." "And that," said he, "is too much for a Cynic (or, for a dog) to receive.""

"Antagoras the poet was boiling a conger, and Antigonus, coming behind him as he was stirring his skillet, said, "Do you think, Antagoras, that Homer boiled congers when he wrote the deeds of Agamemnon?" Antagoras replied, "Do you think, O king, that Agamemnon, when he did such exploits, was a peeping in his army to see who boiled congers?""

"Pyrrhus said, "If I should overcome the Romans in another fight, I were undone.""

"Themistocles being asked whether he would rather be Achilles or Homer, said, "Which would you rather be,—a conqueror in the Olympic games, or the crier that proclaims who are conquerors?""

"He preferred an honest man that wooed his daughter, before a rich man. "I would rather," said Themistocles, "have a man that wants money than money that wants a man.""

"Alcibiades had a very handsome dog, that cost him seven thousand drachmas; and he cut off his tail, "that," said he, "the Athenians may have this story to tell of me, and may concern themselves no further with me.""

"Being summoned by the Athenians out of Sicily to plead for his life, Alcibiades absconded, saying that that criminal was a fool who studied a defence when he might fly for it."

"Lamachus chid a captain for a fault; and when he had said he would do so no more, "Sir," said he, "in war there is no room for a second miscarriage." Said one to Iphicrates, "What are ye afraid of?" "Of all speeches," said he, "none is so dishonourable for a general as ‘I should not have thought of it.'""

"To Harmodius, descended from the ancient Harmodius, when he reviled Iphicrates [a shoemaker's son] for his mean birth, "My nobility," said he, "begins in me, but yours ends in you.""

"Once when Phocion had delivered an opinion which pleased the people,… he turned to his friend and said, "Have I not unawares spoken some mischievous thing or other?""

"Phocion compared the speeches of Leosthenes to cypress-trees. "They are tall," said he, "and comely, but bear no fruit.""

"Lycurgus the Lacedæmonian brought long hair into fashion among his countrymen, saying that it rendered those that were handsome more beautiful, and those that were deformed more terrible. To one that advised him to set up a democracy in Sparta, "Pray," said Lycurgus, "do you first set up a democracy in your own house.""

"King Agis said, "The Lacedæmonians are not wont to ask how many, but where the enemy are.""

"Lysander said, "Where the lion's skin will not reach, it must be pieced with the fox's.""

"To one that promised to give him hardy cocks that would die fighting, "Prithee," said Cleomenes, "give me cocks that will kill fighting.""

"When Eudæmonidas heard a philosopher arguing that only a wise man can be a good general, "This is a wonderful speech," said he; "but he that saith it never heard the sound of trumpets.""

"A soldier told Pelopidas, "We are fallen among the enemies." Said he, "How are we fallen among them more than they among us?""

"Cato the elder wondered how that city was preserved wherein a fish was sold for more than an ox."

"Cato instigated the magistrates to punish all offenders, saying that they that did not prevent crimes when they might, encouraged them. Of young men, he liked them that blushed better than those who looked pale."

"Cato requested old men not to add the disgrace of wickedness to old age, which was accompanied with many other evils."

"He said they that were serious in ridiculous matters would be ridiculous in serious affairs."

"Cicero said loud-bawling orators were driven by their weakness to noise, as lame men to take horse."

"After the battle in Pharsalia, when Pompey was fled, one Nonius said they had seven eagles left still, and advised to try what they would do. "Your advice," said Cicero, "were good if we were to fight jackdaws.""

"After he routed Pharnaces Ponticus at the first assault, he wrote thus to his friends: "I came, I saw, I conquered.""

"As Cæsar was at supper the discourse was of death,—which sort was the best. "That," said he, "which is unexpected.""

"As Athenodorus was taking his leave of Cæsar, "Remember," said he, "Cæsar, whenever you are angry, to say or do nothing before you have repeated the four-and-twenty letters to yourself.""

"Young men," said Cæsar, "hear an old man to whom old men hearkened when he was young."

"Socrates thought that if all our misfortunes were laid in one common heap, whence every one must take an equal portion, most persons would be contented to take their own and depart."

"Diogenes the Cynic, when a little before his death he fell into a slumber, and his physician rousing him out of it asked him whether anything ailed him, wisely answered, "Nothing, sir; only one brother anticipates another,—Sleep before Death.""

"About Pontus there are some creatures of such an extempore being that the whole term of their life is confined within the space of a day; for they are brought forth in the morning, are in the prime of their existence at noon, grow old at night, and then die."

"The measure of a man's life is the well spending of it, and not the length."

"For many, as Cranton tells us, and those very wise men, not now but long ago, have deplored the condition of human nature, esteeming life a punishment, and to be born a man the highest pitch of calamity; this, Aristotle tells us, Silenus declared when he was brought captive to Midas."

"There are two sentences inscribed upon the Delphic oracle, hugely accommodated to the usages of man's life: "Know thyself," and "Nothing too much;" and upon these all other precepts depend."

"To one commending an orator for his skill in amplifying petty matters, Agesilaus said, "I do not think that shoemaker a good workman that makes a great shoe for a little foot.""

"I will show," said Agesilaus, "that it is not the places that grace men, but men the places."

"When one asked him what boys should learn, "That," said he, "which they shall use when men.""

"Agesilaus was very fond of his children; and it is reported that once toying with them he got astride upon a reed as upon a horse, and rode about the room; and being seen by one of his friends, he desired him not to speak of it till he had children of his own."

"When Demaratus was asked whether he held his tongue because he was a fool or for want of words, he replied, "A fool cannot hold his tongue.""

"Lysander, when Dionysius sent him two gowns, and bade him choose which he would carry to his daughter, said, "She can choose best," and so took both away with him."

"A physician, after he had felt the pulse of Pausanias, and considered his constitution, saying, "He ails nothing," "It is because, sir," he replied, "I use none of your physic.""

"And when the physician said, "Sir, you are an old man," "That happens," replied Pausanias, "because you never were my doctor.""

"When one told Plistarchus that a notorious railer spoke well of him, "I 'll lay my life," said he, "somebody hath told him I am dead, for he can speak well of no man living.""

"[Plutarch's Parallel Lives contain] so many beautiful and serious discourses throughout, derived from the deepest and most hidden secrets of moral and natural philosophy, so many wise warnings, and fruitful advice."

"[Plutarch's Lives are] crowded with very wise maxims and rules of life."

"[Plutarch's works contains] the sum of Greek and Latin history made up of great maxims and greater instances, noble precepts and nobler examples, set off with...vigorous eloquence."

"My very own Plutarch – so perfect, so outstanding a judge of human actions."

"Plutarch is amazing in every respect but especially where he makes judgements on men's actions."

"There is another accusation which irritates me on Plutarch's behalf: it is where Bodin says that Plutarch showed good faith in his parallels between Roman and Roman or Greek and Greek but not between Roman and Greek. Witness, he says, Demosthenes and Cicero; Cato and Aristides; Sylla and Lysander; Marcellus and Pelopidas; Pompey and Agesilaus, reckoning as he does that he favoured the Greeks by matching them so unfairly. That is precisely to attack what is most excellent and commendable in Plutarch: for in those parallel lives (which are the most admirable part of his works and to my mind the one he took most pleasure in) the faithfulness and purity of his judgements equals their weight and profundity. He is a philosopher who teaches us what virtue is."

"In the writings of such "pagan" philosophers as Plutarch and Porphyry we find a humanitarian ethic of the most exalted kind, which, after undergoing a long repression during medieval churchdom, reappeared, albeit but weakly and fitfully at first, in the literature of the Renaissance, to be traced more definitely in the eighteenth century school of "sensibility.""

"[I]t is extremely difficult to say whether he wishes to expound moral philosophy with historical examples, or decorate the narration of important affairs...with philosophical arguments."

"The art of writing history is the art of emphasizing the significant facts at the expense of the insignificant. And it is the same in every field of knowledge. Knowledge is power only if a man knows what facts not to bother about."

"Most of us can remember a time when a birthday — especially if it was one's own — brightened the world as if a second sun had risen."

"There are some people who want to throw their arms round you simply because it is Christmas; there are other people who want to strangle you simply because it is Christmas."

"We welcome almost any break in the monotony of things, and a man has only to murder a series of wives in a new way to become known to millions of people who have never heard of Homer."

"In order to see birds it is necessary to become a part of the silence. One has to sit still like a mystic and wait. One soon learns that fussing, instead of achieving things, merely prevents things from happening. To be passive is in some circumstances the most efficient form of activity. You cannot command events: you can only put yourself in the place where events will happen to you. No impatient man has ever seen Nature."

"The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions."

"Merece lo que sueñas."

"There can be no society without poetry, but society can never be realized as poetry, it is never poetic. Sometimes the two terms seek to break apart. They cannot."

"Only now have I understood that there was a secret relationship between what I have called my expulsion from the present and the writing of poetry. Poetry is in love with the instant and seeks to relive it in the poem, thus separating it from sequential time and turning it into a fixed present. But at that time I wrote without wondering why I was doing it. I was searching for the gateway to the present: I wanted to belong to my time and to my century. A little later this obsession became a fixed idea: I wanted to be a modern poet. My search for modernity had begun."

"To fight evil is to fight ourselves."

"If you are the amber mare"

"Between going and staying the day wavers,"

"I am a man: little do I last"

"::::We are condemned"

"The Hindu genius is a love for abstraction and, at the same time, a passion for the concrete image. At times It is rich, at others prolix. It has created the most lucid and the most instinctive art. It is abstract and realistic, sexual and intellectual, pedantic and sublime. It lives between extremes, it embraces the extremes, rooted in the earth and drawn to an invisible beyond."

"And to fill all these white pages that are left for me with the same monotonous question: at what hour do the hours end?"

"I too await the coming of my hour, I too exist. No. I quit. Yes, I know, I could settle down in an idea, in a custom, in an obsession. Or stretch out on the coals of a pain or some hope and wait there, not making much noise. Of course it's not so bad: I eat, drink, sleep, make love, observe the marked holidays and go to the beach in summer. People like me and I like them. I take my condition lightly: sickness, insomnia, nightmares, social gatherings, the idea of death, the little worm that burrows into the heart or the liver (the little worm that leaves its eggs in the brain and at night pierces the deepest sleep), the future at the expense of today – the today that never comes on time, that always loses its bets. No. I renounce my ration card, my I.D., my birth certificate, voter's registration, passport, code number, countersign, credentials, safe conduct pass, insignia, tattoo, brand."

"The world stretches out before me, the vast world of the big, the little, and the medium. Universe of kings and presidents and jailors, of mandarins and pariahs and liberators and liberated, of judges and witnesses and the condemned: stars of the first, second, third and nth magnitudes, planets, comets, bodies errant and eccentric or routine and domesticated by the laws of gravity, the subtle laws of falling, all keeping step, all turning slowly or rapidly around a void. Where they claim the central sun lies, the solar being, the hot beam made out of every human gaze, there is nothing but a hole and less than a hole: the eye of a dead fish, the giddy cavity of the eye that falls into itself and looks at itself without seeing. There is nothing with which to fill the hollow center of the whirlwind. The springs are smashed, the foundations collapsed, the visible or invisible bonds that joined one star to another, one body to another, one man to another, are nothing but a tangle of wires and thorns, a jungle of claws and teeth that twist us and chew us and spit us out and chew us again. No one hangs himself by the rope of a physical law. The equations fall tirelessly into themselves. And in regard to the present matter, if the present matters: I do not belong to the masters. I don't wash my hands of it, but I am not a judge, nor a witness for the prosecution, nor an executioner. I do not torture, interrogate, or suffer interrogation. I do not loudly plead for leniency, nor wish to save myself or anyone else. And for all that I don't do and for all that they do to us, I neither ask forgiveness nor forgive. Their piety is as abject as their justice. Am I innocent? I'm guilty. Am I guilty? I'm innocent. (I'm innocent when I'm guilty, guilty when I'm innocent. I'm guilty when … but that is another song. Another song? It's all the same song.) Guilty innocent, innocent guilty, the fact is I quit."

"I remember my loves, my conversation, my friendships. I remember it all, see it all, see them all. With melancholy, but without nostalgia. And above all, without hope. I know that it is immortal, and that, if we are anything, we are the hope of something. For me, expectation has spent itself. I quit the nevertheless, the even, the in spite of everything, the moratoriums, the excuses and forgiving. I know the mechanism of the trap of morality and the drowsiness of certain words. I have lost faith in all those constructions of stone, ideas, ciphers. I quit. I no longer defend this broken tower. And, in silence, I await the event."

"The first deaths will barely swell the daily count, and no one in the statistics bureau will notice that extra zero. But after a while everyone will begin to look at each other and ask: what's happening? Because for months doors and windows are going to rattle, furniture and trees will creak."

"No use going out or staying at home. No use erecting walls against the impalpable. A mouth will extinguish all the fires, a doubt will root up all the decisions. It will be everywhere without being anywhere. It will blur all the. mirrors. Penetrating walls and convictions, vestments and well-tempered souls, it will install itself in the marrow of everyone. Whistling between body and body, crouching between soul and soul. And all the wounds will open because, with expert and delicate, although somewhat cold, hands, it will irritate sores and pimples, will burst pustules and swellings and dig into the old, badly healed wounds. Oh fountain of blood, forever inexhaustible! Life will be a knife, a gray and agile and cutting and exact and arbitrary blade that falls and slashes and divides. To crack, to claw, to quarter, the verbs that move with giant steps against us! It is not the sword that shines in the confusion of what will be. It is not the saber, but fear and the whip. I speak of what is already among us. Everywhere there are trembling and whispers, insinuations and murmurs. Everywhere the light wind blows, the breeze that provokes the immense Whiplash each time it unwinds in the air. Already many carry the purple insignia in their flesh. The light wind rises from the meadows of the past, and hurries closer to our time."

"Death is a mirror which reflects the vain gesticulations of the living. The whole motley confusion of acts, occasions, regrets and hopes which is the life of each one of us finds in death, not meaning or explanation, but an end."

"The word "death" is not pronounced in New York, in Paris, in London, because it burns the lips. The Mexican, in contrast, is familiar with death, jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it; it is one of his favorite toys and his most steadfast love. True, there is perhaps as much fear in his attitude as in that of others, but at least death is not hidden away; he looks at it it face to face, with impatience, disdain or irony."

"Solitude—the feeling and knowledge that one is alone, alienated from the world and oneself—is not an exclusively Mexican characteristic. All men, at some moment in their lives, feel themselves to be alone. And they are. To live is to be separated from what we were in order to approach what we are going to be in the mysterious future. Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another. His nature—if that word can be used in reference to man, who has "invented" himself by saying "No" to nature—consists in his longing to realize himself in another. Man is nostalgia and a search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude."

"Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason."

"willow of crystal, a poplar of water, a pillar of fountain by the wind drawn over, tree that is firmly rooted and that dances, turning course of a river that goes curving, advances and retreats, goes roundabout, arriving forever:"

"I travel through your waist as through a river, I voyage your body as through a grove going, as by a footpath going up a mountain and suddenly coming upon a steep ravine I go the straitened way of your keen thoughts break through to daylight upon your white forehead and there my spirit flings itself down, is shattered now I collect my fragments one by one and go on, bodiless, searching, in the dark…. you take on the likeness of a tree, a cloud, you are all birds and now you are a star, now you resemble the sharp edge of a sword and now the executioner's bowl of blood, the encroaching ivy that over grows and then roots out the soul and divides it from itself,"

"I want to go on, to go beyond; I cannot; the moment scatters itself in many things, I have slept the dreams of the stone that never dreams and deep among the dreams of years like stones have heard the singing of my imprisoned blood, with a premonition of light the sea sang, and one by one the barriers give way, all of the gates have fallen to decay, the sun has forced an entrance through my forehead, has opened my eyelids at last that were kept closed, unfastened my being of its swaddling clothes, has rooted me out of my self, and separated me from my animal sleep centuries of stone and the magic of reflections resurrects willow of crystal, a poplar of water, a pillar of fountain by the wind drawn over, tree that is firmly rooted and that dances, turning course of a river that goes curving, advances and retreats, goes roundabout, arriving forever:"

"Man does not speak because he thinks; he thinks because he speaks. Or rather, speaking is no different than thinking: to speak is to think."

"If we are a metaphor of the universe, the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms. The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time."

""Art" is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers…what we call art is a game."

"To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears."

"Many psychiatrists think, like Huxley, that these substances hallucinogens] are neither more nor less dangerous than alcohol. It is not necessary to entirely accept this opinion — although to me it seems to be not far from the truth — in order to recognize that the authorities prohibit these drugs not so much in the name of public health as in the name of public morality. They are a challenge to the ideals of activity, utility, progress, work, and similar notions that justify our daily routine. Alcoholism is an infraction of social rules. Everyone tolerates it because the violation confirms the rules. This case is analogous to prostitution: neither the drunk nor the prostitute and her clientele call into doubt the rules they break. Their acts are a disturbance of order, not a criticism of it. The use of hallucinogens, on the other hand, implies a negation of prevailing social values. … We can now understand the true reason for their condemnation and its severity. The authorities aren’t suppressing a reprehensible practice or a crime. They are suppressing dissidence. … Prohibition is a battle against a contagion of the spirit — against an opinion. The authorities reveal, in their ideological zeal, that they are pursuing a heresy, not a crime."

"The best thing to do will be to choose the path to Galta, traverse it again (invent it as I traverse it), and without realizing it, almost imperceptibly, go to the end — without being concerned about what “going to the end” means or what I meant when I wrote that phrase. At the very beginning of the journey, already far off the main highway, as I walked along the path that leads to Galta, past the little grove of banyan trees and the pools of foul stagnant water, through the Gateway fallen into ruins and into the main courtyard bordered by dilapidated houses, I also had no idea where I was going, and was not concerned about it. I wasn’t asking myself questions: I was walking, merely walking, with no fixed itinerary in mind. I was simply setting forth to meet … what? I didn’t know at the time, and I still don’t know. Perhaps that is why I wrote “going to the end”: in order to find out, in order to discover what there is after the end. A verbal trap; after the end there is nothing, since if there were something, the end would not be the end. Nonetheless, we are always setting forth to meet … even though we know that there is nothing, or no one, awaiting us. We go along, without a fixed itinerary, yet at the same time with an end (what end?) in mind, and with the aim of reaching the end. A search for the end, a dread of the end: the obverse and the reverse of the same act. Without this end that constantly eludes us we would not journey forth, nor would there be any paths. But the end is the refutation and the condemnation of the path: at the end the path dissolves, the meeting fades away to nothingness. And the end — it too fades away to nothingness."

"Images, memories, fragmentary shapes and forms — all those sensations, visions, half-thoughts that appear and disappear in the wink of an eye, as one sets forth to meet…. The path also disappears as I think of it, as I say it."

"It is not proper to project our feelings onto things or to attribute our own sensations and passions to them. Can it also be improper to see in them a guide, a way of life? To learn the art of remaining motionless amid the agitation of the whirlwind, to learn to remain still and to be as transparent as this fixed light amid the frantic branches — this may be a program for life."

"Fixity is always momentary. It is an equilibrium, at once precarious and perfect, that lasts the space of an instant: a flickering of the light, the appearance of a cloud, or a slight change in temperature is enough to break the repose-pact and unleash the series of metamorphoses. Each metamorphosis, in turn, is another moment of fixity succeeded by another change and another unexpected equilibrium. No one is alone, and each change here brings about another change there. No one is alone and nothing is solid: change is comprised of fixities that are momentary accords."

"Ought I to say that the form of change is fixity, or more precisely, that change is an endless search for fixity? A nostalgia for inertia: indolence and its frozen paradises. Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two. A constant coming and going: wisdom lies in the momentary. It is transition. But the moment I say transition, the spell is broken. Transition is not wisdom, but a simple going toward… Transition vanishes: only thus is it transition."

"Fixity is always momentary. But how can it always be so? If it were, it would not be momentary — or would not be fixity. What did I mean by that phrase? I probably had in mind the opposition between motion and motionlessness, an opposition that the adverb always designates as continual and universal: it embraces all of time and applies to every circumstance. My phrase tends to dissolve this opposition and hence represents a sly violation of the principle of identity. I say “sly” because I chose the word momentary as an adjectival qualifier of fixity in order to tone down the violence of the contrast between movement and motionlessness. A little rhetorical trick intended to give an air of plausibility to my violation of the rules of logic. The relations between rhetoric and ethics are disturbing: the ease with which language can be twisted is worrisome, and the fact that our minds accept these perverse games so docilely is no less cause for concern. We ought to subject language to a diet of bread and water if we wish to keep it from being corrupted and from corrupting us. (The trouble is that a-diet-of-bread-and-water is a figurative expression, as is the-corruption-of-language-and-its-contagions.) It is necessary to unweave (another metaphor) even the simplest phrases in order to determine what it is that they contain (more figurative expressions) and what they are made of and how (what is language made of? and most important of all, is it already made, or is it something that is perpetually in the making?). Unweave the verbal fabric: reality will appear. (Two metaphors.) Can reality be the reverse of the fabric, the reverse of metaphor — that which is on the other side of language? (Language has no reverse, no opposite faces, no right or wrong side.) Perhaps reality too is a metaphor (of what and/or of whom?). Perhaps things are not things but words: metaphors, words for other things. With whom and of what do word-things speak? (This page is a sack of word-things.) It may be that, like things which speak to themselves in their language of things, language does not speak of things or of the world: it may speak only of itself and to itself."

"Since movement is a metaphor for change, the best thing will be to say: nonchange is (always) change. It would appear that I have finally arrived at the desired disequilibrium. Nonetheless, change is not the primordial, original word that I am searching for: it is a form of becoming. When becoming is substituted for change, the relation between the two terms is altered, so that I am obliged to replace nonchange by permanence, which is a metaphor for fixity, as becoming is for coming-to-be, which in turn is a metaphor for time in all its ceaseless transformations…. There is no beginning, no original word: each one is a metaphor for another word which is a metaphor for yet another, and so on. All of them are translations of translations. A transparency in which the obverse is the reverse: fixity is always momentary. I begin all over again: if it does not make sense to say that fixity is always momentary, the same may not be true if I say that it never is."

"My phrase is a moment, the moment of fixity in the monologue of Zeno the Eleatic and Huí Shih (“I leave today for Yüeh and I arrive yesterday”). In this monologue one of the terms finally devours the other: either motionlessness is merely a state of movement (as in my phrase), or else movement is only an illusion of motionlessness (as among the Hindus). Therefore we ought not to say either always or never, but almost always or almost never, merely from time to time or more than is generally supposed and less than this expression might indicate, frequently or seldom, consistently or occasionally, we don’t have at our disposal sufficient data to state with certainty whether it is periodic or irregular: fixity (always, never, almost always, almost never, etc.) is momentary (always, never, almost always, almost never, etc.) fixity (always, never, almost always, almost never, etc.) is momentary (always, never, almost always, almost never, etc.) fixity…. All this means that fixity never is entirely fixity and that it is always a moment of change. Fixity is always momentary."

"Repetitions, you wander about lost amid repetitions, you are merely a repetition among other repetitions. An artist of repetitions, a past master of disfigurations, a maestro of demolitions. The trees repeat other trees, the sands other sands, the jungle of letters is repetition, the stretch of dunes is repetition, the plethora is emptiness, emptiness is a plethora, I repeat repetitions, lost in the thicket of signs, wandering about in the trackless sand, stains on the wall beneath this sun of Galta, stains on this afternoon in Cambridge, a thicket and a stretch of dunes, stains on my forehead that assembles and disassembles vague landscapes. You are (I am) is a repetition among other repetitions. You are is I am; I am is you are: you are is I. Demolitions: I stretch out full length atop my triturations, I inhabit my demolitions."

"The Great Monkey closes his eyes, scratches himself again and muses: before the sun has become completely hidden — it is now fleeing amid the tall bamboo trees like an animal pursued by shadows — I shall succeed in reducing this grove of trees to a catalogue. A page of tangled plant calligraphy. A thicket of signs: how to read it, how to clear a path through this denseness? Hanumān smiles with pleasure at the analogy that has just occurred to him: calligraphy and vegetation, a grove of trees and writing, reading and a path. Following a path: reading a stretch of ground, deciphering a fragment of world. Reading considered as a path toward…. The path as a reading: an interpretation of the natural world? He closes his eyes once more and sees himself, in another age, writing (on a piece of paper or on a rock, with a pen or with a chisel?) the act in the Mahanātaka describing his visit to the grove of the palace of Rāvana. He compares its rhetoric to a page of indecipherable calligraphy and thinks: the difference between human writing and divine consists in the fact that the number of signs of the former is limited, whereas that of the latter is infinite; hence the universe is a meaningless text, one which even the gods find illegible. The critique of the universe (and that of the gods) is called grammar…. Disturbed by this strange thought, Hanumān leaps down from the wall, remains for a moment in a squatting position, then stands erect, scrutinizes the four points of the compass, and resolutely makes his way into the thicket."

"time in an allegory of itself imparts to us lessons of wisdom which the moment they are formulated are immediately destroyed by the merest flickers of light or shadow which are nothing more than time in its incarnations and disincarnations which are the phrases that I am writing on this paper and that disappears as I read them: they are not the sensations, the perceptions, the mental images, and the thoughts which flare up and die away here, now, as I write or as I read what I write: they are not what I see or what I have seen, they are the reverse of what is seen and of the power of sight—but they are not the invisible: they are the unsaid residuum; they are not the other side of reality but, rather, the other side of language, what we have on the tip of our tongue that vanishes before it is said, the other side that cannot be named because it is the opposite of a name: what is not said is not this or that which we leave unsaid, nor is it neither-this-nor-that: it is not the tree that I say I see but the sensation that I feel on sensing that I see it at the moment when I am just about to say that I see it, an insubstantial but real conjunction of vibrations and sounds and meanings that on being combined suggest the configuration of a green-bronze-black-woody-leafy-sonorous-silent presence; no, it is not that either, if it is not a name it surely cannot be the description of a name or the description of the sensation of the name or the name of the sensation: a tree is not the name tree, nor is it the sensation of tree: it is the sensation of a perception of tree that dies away at the very moment of the perception of the sensation of tree; names, as we already know, are empty, but what we did not know, or if we did know, had forgotten, is that sensations are perceptions of sensations that die away, sensations that vanish on becoming perceptions, since if they were not perceptions, how would we know that they are sensations?; sensations that are not perceptions are not sensations, perceptions that are not names—what are they? if you didn’t know it before, you know now: everything is empty; and the moment I say everything-is-empty, I am aware that I am falling into a trap: if everything is empty, this everything-is-empty is empty too; no, it is full, full to overflowing, everything-is-empty is replete with itself, what we touch and see and taste and smell and think, the realities that we invent and the realities that touch us, look at us, hear us, and invent us, everything that we weave and unweave and everything that weaves and unweaves us, momentary appearances and disappearances, each one different and unique, is always the same full reality, always the same fabric that is woven as it is unwoven: even total emptiness and utter privation are plenitude (perhaps they are the apogee, the acme, the consummation and the calm of plenitude), everything is full to the brim, everything is real, all these invented realities and all these very real inventions are full of themselves, each and every one of them, replete with their own reality; and the moment I say this, they empty themselves: things empty themselves and names fill themselves, they are no longer empty, names are plethoras, they are donors, they are full to bursting with blood, milk, semen, sap, they are swollen with minutes, hours, centuries, pregnant with meanings and significations and signals, they are the secret signs that time makes to itself, names suck the marrow from things, things die on this page but names increase and multiply, things die in order that names may live:"

"the reality beyond language is not completely reality, a reality that does not speak or say is not reality; and the moment I say that, the moment I write, letter by letter, that a reality stripped of names is not reality, the names evaporate, they are air, they are a sound encased in another sound and in another and another, a murmur, a faint cascade of meanings that fade away to nothingness: the tree that I say is not the tree that I see, tree does not say tree, the tree is beyond its name, a leafy, woody reality: impenetrable, untouchable, a reality beyond signs, immersed in itself, firmly planted in its own reality: I can touch it but I cannot name it, I can set fire to it but if I name it I dissolve it: the tree that is there among the trees is not the tree that I name but a reality that is beyond names, beyond the word reality, it is simply reality just as it is, the abolition of differences and also the abolition of similarities; the tree that I name is not the tree, and the other one, the one that I do not name and that is there, on the other side of my window, its trunk now black and its foliage still inflamed by the setting sun, is not the tree either, but, rather, the inaccessible reality in which it is planted: between the one and the other there appears the single tree of sensation which is the perception of the sensation of tree that is vanishing, but who perceives, who senses, who vanishes as sensations and perceptions vanish?"

"no reality is mine, no reality belongs to me (to us), we all live somewhere else, beyond where we are, we are all a reality different from the word I or the word we; our most intimate reality lies outside ourselves and is not ours, and it is not one but many, plural and transitory, we are this plurality that is continually dissolving, the self is perhaps real, but the self is not I or you or he, the self is neither mine nor yours, it is a state, a blink of the eye, it is the perception of a sensation that is vanishing, but who or what perceives, who senses? are the eyes that look at what I write the same eyes that I say are looking at what I write? we come and go between the word that dies away as it is uttered and the sensation that vanishes in perception—although we do not know who it is that utters the word nor who it is that perceives, although we do know that the self that perceives something that is vanishing also vanishes in this perception: it is only the perception of that self s own extinction, we come and go: the reality beyond names is not habitable and the reality of names is a perpetual falling to pieces, there is nothing solid in the universe, in the entire dictionary there is not a single word on which to rest our heads, everything is a continual coming and going from things to names to things, no, I say that I perpetually come and go but I haven’t moved, as the tree has not moved since I began to write, inexact expressions once again: I began, I write, who is writing what I am reading?, the question is reversible: what am I reading when I write: who is writing what I am reading?"

"the phrases that I write on this paper are sensations, perceptions, images, etcetera, which flare up and die down here, in front of my eyes, the verbal residuum: the only thing that remains of the felt, imagined, thought, perceived, and vanished realities, the only reality that these evaporated realities leave behind, a reality that, even though it is merely a combination of signs, is no less real than they are: the signs are not presences but they configure another presence, the phrases fall into line one after the other on the page and as they advance they open up a path toward a temporarily final end, the phrases configure a presence that disappears, they are the configuration of the abolition of presence, yes, it is as though all these presences woven by the configurations of the signs were seeking its abolition in order that there might appear those inaccessible trees, immersed in themselves, not said, that are beyond the end of this phrase, on the other side, there where eyes read what I am writing, and on reading it, dissipate it"

"In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature, Octavio Paz said, "Soon I discovered the defense of poetry, disregarded in our century, became inseparable from the defense of liberty." Paz also said that "throughout history and under the most diverse circumstances, poets have participated in politics. I do not refer to poetry as a form of art to be used by the State. No. I refer to the free participation of the poets in the matters of his/her city." Paz's words ring true for the vibrant mosaic of voices this anthology exemplifies."

"I belong to the first generation of Latin American writers brought up reading other Latin American writers. Before my time the work of Latin American writers was not well distributed, even on our continent. In Chile it was very hard to read other writers from Latin America. My greatest influences have been all the great writers of the Latin American Boom in literature: García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Cortázar, Borges, Paz, Rulfo, Amado, etc."

"I admire Octavio Paz very much... but I don't but I don't agree with one of his theses about Mexican history. He maintains that the Plaza of the Three Cultures is a place of sacrifices, and that because we have Aztec ancestors we are condemned cyclically to slaughter a great number of people. This thesis is highly debatable... It's not possible to say that because we carry within us the potential for human sacrifice, we retain across the years the need to kill."

"Whatever her or his social identity, the writer is, by the nature of the act of writing, someone who strives for communication and connection, someone who searches, through language, to keep alive the conversation with what Octavio Paz has called "the lost community." Even if what's written feels like a note thrust into a bottle to be thrown into the sea."

"A writer is in the end not his books, but his myth. And that myth is in the keeping of others."

"India has been very lucky in the Nehru family. Nehru was unique in recent world history: a colonial protest figure, a folk hero who did not appeal to fanaticism but was a reasonable, reasoning man. A man committed to science, religious tolerance, the rule of law and the rights of man. Indira Gandhi, his daughter, carried on this way of looking at things. In Britain, she might have had the reputation of being domineering, harsh, even ruthless. And you can easily make a case for her being authoritarian, antidemocratic, stamping out protest. But it isn't enough just to do that. One must consider what was on the other side. In 1975, some opposition parties wanted India to go back to some pre-industrial time of village life. Piety can take odd forms."

"Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two."

"One isn't born one's self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people's ideas — and you have to work through it all."

"One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria."

"To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn't know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up."

"What is happening in India is a mighty creative process.... But every other Indian knows precisely what is happening. Deep down he knows that a larger response is emerging to their historical humiliation. … It is not enough to abuse these youths or use that fashionable word from Europe, 'fascism'… There is a big, historical development going on in India. Wise men should understand it and ensure that it does not remain in the hands of fanatics."

"What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And — though played out forms can throw up miraculous sports like The Importance of Being Earnest or Decline and Fall — what is good is always what is new, in both form and content. What is good forgets whatever models it might have had, and is unexpected; we have to catch it on the wing."

"I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true. It might seem strange that a man who has dealt in words and emotions and ideas for nearly fifty years shouldn't have a few to spare, so to speak. But everything of value about me is in my books. Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will — with luck — come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise. That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing."

"It [Islam] has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say 'my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn't matter'... This abolition of the self demanded by Muslims was worse than the similar colonial abolition of identity. It is much, much worse in fact... You cannot just say you came out of nothing."

"We knew nothing but despotism. That is why the very rich Mughal empire could break up into nothing. Turn to dust at the merest touch of a foreign power. There was no institution, there was no creative nation, no university, no printing press, there was nothing but personal power. … How do you ignore history? But the nationalist movement, independence movement ignored it. You read the Glimpses of World History by Jawaharlal Nehru, it talks about the mythical past and then it jumps the difficult period of the invasions and conquests. So you have Chinese pilgrims coming to Bihar, Nalanda and places like that. Then somehow they don't tell you what happens, why these places are in ruin. They never tell you why Elephanta island is in ruins or why Bhubaneswar was desecrated. So history has to be studied, it is very painful history. But it is not more painful than most countries have had. … It isn't India alone that has had a rough time, that has to be understood. But the rough time has to be faced and it cannot be glossed over. There are tools for us to understand the rough time. We can read a man like Ibn Battuta who will tell you what it was like to be there in the midst of the fourteenth century, terrible times. An apologist of the invaders would like to gloss that over. But it would be wrong to gloss that over, that has to be understood. … But I would like to see this past recovered and not dodged."

"If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead."

"I have to stress that I was traveling in the non-Arab Muslim world. Islam began as an Arab religion; it spread as an Arab empire. In Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia—the countries of my itinerary—I was traveling, therefore, among people who had been converted to what was an alien faith. I was traveling among people who had to make a double adjustment—an adjustment to the European empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and an earlier adjustment to the Arab faith. You might almost say that I was among people who had been doubly colonized, doubly removed from themselves."

"It turns out now that the Arabs were the most successful imperialists of all time; since to be conquered by them (and then to be like them) is still, in the minds of the faithful, to be saved."

"At the height of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, V.S. Naipaul saw it as ‘a new, historical awakening’, of ‘Indians becoming alive to their history’ and ‘beginning to understand that there has been a great vandalising of India. Because of the nature of the conquest and the nature of Hindu society such understanding had eluded Indians before’."

"It is like reading of a land periodically devastated by hordes of lemmings or locusts; it is like turning from the history of a coral reef, in which every act and every death is a foundation, to the depressing chronicle of a succession of castles built on the waste sand of the sea-shore. This is Woodruff on the difference between European history and Indian history. He has chosen his images well. But the sandcastle is not quite exact. The sandcastle is flattened by the tide and leaves not trace, and India is above all the land of ruins."

"The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves."

"India is for me a difficult country. It isn’t my home and cannot be my home; and yet I cannot reject it or be indifferent to it; I cannot travel only for the sights. I am at once too close and too far."

"While the Ottomans moved into South-East Europe, the Moghul invasion of India destroyed much of Hindu and Buddhist civilization there. The recent destruction by Moslems in Afghanistan of colossal Buddhist statues is a reminder of what happened to temples and shrines, on an enormous scale, when Islam took over."

"The key Hindu concept of dharma — the right way, the sanctioned way, which all men must follow, according to their natures — is an elastic concept. At its noblest it combines self-fulfillment and truth to the self with the ideas of action as duty, action as its own spiritual reward, man as a holy vessel."

"The time before Islam is a time of blackness: that is part of Muslim theology. History has to serve theology.”"

"I also bought a copy of The New York Times, the previous day's issue of which I had seen the previous day in Puerto Rico. I was interested in newspapers and knew this paper to be one of the foremost in the world. But to read a newspaper for the first time is like coming into a film that has been on for an hour. Newspapers are like serials. To understand them you have to take knowledge to them; the knowledge that serves best is the knowledge provided by the newspaper itself. It made me feel a stranger, that paper."

"Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart; it is enough that there is something there."

"The family feuds or the village feuds often had to do with an idea of honor. Perhaps it was a peasant idea; perhaps this idea of honor is especially important to a society without recourse to law or without confidence in law."

"Religion now had to have its compartment, almost its social place. The frontier had ceased to exist. And the religions it had bred were beginning slowly to die. In the old days, when men, often of little education, had needed only to declare themselves ministers, people would have seen themselves reflected in the expounders of the Word. This quality of homespun would have made the religions appear creations of a community, personal and close and inviolable. Now a certain distance was needed."

"I never formulated the idea of the universal civilization until 11 years ago, when I traveled for many months in a number of non-Arab Muslim countries — Iran, Indonesia, Malaysia and Pakistan — to try to understand what had driven them to their rage. That Muslim rage was just beginning to be apparent. I thought I would be traveling among people who would be like the people of my own community, the Trinidad Indian community. A large portion of Indians were Muslims; we both had a similar 19th century imperial or colonial history. But it wasn't like that. Despite the history we had in common, I had traveled a different way. Starting with the Hindu background of the instinctive, ritualized life; growing up in the unpromising conditions of colonial Trinidad; I had gone through many stages of knowledge and self-knowledge. I had been granted the ideas of inquiry and the tools of scholarship. I could carry four or five or six different cultural ideas in my head. Now, traveling among non-Arab Muslims, I found myself among a colonized people who had been stripped by their faith of all that expanding cultural and historical knowledge of the world that I had been growing into on the other side of the world."

"One of Joseph Conrad's earliest stories of the East Indies, from the 1890's, was about a local raja or chieftain, a murderous man, a Muslim (though it is never explicitly said), who, in a crisis, having lost his magical counselor, swims out one night to one of the English merchant ships in the harbor to ask the sailors, representatives of the immense power that had come from the other end of the world, for an amulet, a magical charm. The sailors are at a loss; but then someone among them gives the raja a British coin, a sixpence commemorating Queen Victoria's Jubilee; and the raja is well pleased. Conrad didn't treat the story as a joke; he loaded it with philosophical implications for both sides, and I feel now that he saw truly. In the 100 years since that story, the wealth of the world has grown, power has grown, education has spread; the disturbance, the "philosophical shriek" of men at the margin (to use Conrad's words), has been amplified."

"The universal civilization has been a long time in the making. It wasn't always universal; it wasn't always as attractive as it is today. The expansion of Europe gave it for at least three centuries a racial taint, which still causes pain. In Trinidad I grew up in the last days of that kind of racialism. And that, perhaps, has given me a greater appreciation of the immense changes that have taken place since the end of the war, the extraordinary attempt to accommodate the rest of the world, and all the currents of that world's thought. Because my movement within this civilization has been from Trinidad to England, from the periphery to the center, I may have felt certain of its guiding principles more freshly than people to whom these things were everyday. One such realization — I suppose I have sensed it most of my life, but I have understood it philosophically only during the preparation of this talk — has been the beauty of the idea of the pursuit of happiness. Familiar words, easy to take for granted; easy to misconstrue. This idea of the pursuit of happiness is at the heart of the attractiveness of the civilization to so many outside it or on its periphery. I find it marvelous to contemplate to what an extent, after two centuries, and after the terrible history of the earlier part of this century, the idea has come to a kind of fruition. It is an elastic idea; it fits all men. It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit. I don't imagine my father's Hindu parents would have been able to understand the idea. So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist, and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away."

"Islam is in its origins an Arab religion. Everyone not an Arab who is a Muslim is a convert. Islam is not simply a matter of conscience or private belief. It makes imperial demands. A convert’s worldview alters. His holy places are in Arab lands; his sacred language is Arabic. His idea of history alters. He rejects his own; he becomes, whether he likes it or not, a part of the Arab story. The convert has to turn away from everything that is his. The disturbance for societies is immense, and even after a thousand years can remain unresolved; the turning away has to be done again and again. People develop fantasies about who and what they are; and in the Islam of converted countries there is an element of neurosis and nihilism. These countries can be easily set on the boil."

"<!-- This commented out section seems to be a paraphrase not precisely located within "Beyond Belief" :"

"To the convert his land is of no religious or historical importance; its relics are of no account; only the sands of Arabia are sacred."

"Life doesn't have a neat beginning and a tidy end, life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end in the middle, and it should be all there."

"I could scarcely bear to look at her eyes. They promised such intimacies."

"I thought how terrible it would have been if, as could so easily have happened, I had died without knowing this depth of satisfaction, this other person that I had just discovered within myself. It was worth any price, any consequence."

"And whenever I saw Luis, Graça's husband, I dealt with him with a friendship that was quite genuine, since it was offered out of gratitude for Graça's love."

"Before comfort had been squeezed out of the hard land, like blood out of stone."

"I quite like Naipaul's absence of sentiment, but if I have a quarrel with Naipaul, it is that I don't like the way that that absence of sentiment is not conveyed or expressed with richness of metaphor or generosity of character-creating. King Lear is fucking bleak, man, nothing is more bleak, but look how beautiful it is. So while one eschews sentiment because it creates bad art, I think one has got to express bleakness with a generosity of creativity, with music and sensuousness, otherwise it's just a dry, tedious self-denial."

"Naipaul is essentially a writer of discovery. He tries on occasion to look into the past through the evidence of the present. That’s what he did in writing about the ruins of Vijayanagar in India: A Wounded Civilisation. He is not a professional historian, but his insights and perspectives on Indian history are unique and as startling in their accuracy as the observations of his travel."

"(TB: Do you read V. S. Naipaul? Do you like Naipaul?) NH: I read his earlier short story collection Miguel Street over and over when I was a kid. I really liked it. I think it still holds up fairly well, but I haven't read his newer work. He is, of course, notorious amongst his fellow Caribbean writers and everyone else for his outrageously racist and sexist statements. I don't like those. But I find him easy to ignore."

"Naipaul seems to have made himself the spokesman for the permanent, and one's tempted to say, the professional, expatriate from the Third World. His characters savour their marginality. I write about New Americans and New Canadians, about belated homesteaders from nontraditional countries. My characters grow and change with the change in citizenships."

"Naipaul’s legacy will never be entirely straightforward – which does not mean he should not be read, enjoyed, debated and critiqued. Salman Rushdie’s brief tribute to Naipaul indicates the complexities: “We disagreed all our lives, about politics, about literature, and I feel as sad as if I just lost a beloved older brother,” he wrote on Twitter. In an era that yearns to render life in black and white, the complications of VS Naipaul are a reminder that it is more wisely seen in shades of grey."

"I think that there are writers who I don’t necessarily agree with in terms of their politics, but whose writings are sort of a baseline for how to think about certain things — VS Naipaul, for example. … His A Bend in the River starts with the line, "The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it." And I always think about that line, and I think about his novels when I’m thinking about the hardness of the world sometimes, particularly in foreign policy, and I resist and fight against sometimes that very cynical, more realistic view of the world. And yet, there are times where it feels as if that may be true."

"Let us add one more complication success brings: the illusion of predestination. In this regard I cannot help recalling a long conversation with V. S. Naipaul in which he insisted that he could not have failed as an author, and that recognition, even immediate recognition, of his genius was inevitable, simply because he was so good. I could not persuade him to accept that he only believed this because he had in fact been successful and that it must have been possible, given the world’s perversity, for recognition to have eluded him. The conviction of predestination came after the event."

"The World Is What It Is was a fitting title for the biography of a writer who struggled all his life between poles. On the one hand, there was social and personal anomie, on the other a commitment to vocation. He had a mutated Hindu view that all the world was illusion and only the self was real, and yet his writing showed him observing and reporting the external world with precision. He was a difficult man to get to know. His meaning for the island of his birth, and for the world after the centuries of empires and colonies, “everything of value”, as he put it in his Nobel lecture, was in his books: "I am the sum of my books." In time, that will be seen as his most appropriate epitaph."

"We are alone, absolutely alone on this chance planet: and, amid all the forms of life that surround us, not one, excepting the dog, has made an alliance with us."

"The future is a world limited by ourselves; in it we discover only what concerns us and, sometimes, by chance, what interests those whom we love the most."

"Men's weaknesses are often necessary to the purposes of life."

"All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than the animals that know nothing. A day will come when science will turn upon its error and no longer hesitate to shorten our woes. A day will come when it will dare and act with certainty; when life, grown wiser, will depart silently at its hour, knowing that it has reached its term."

"I knew that if I was captured by the Germans I would be shot at once, since I have always been counted as an enemy of Germany because of my play, Le Bourgmestre de Stillemonde, which dealt with the conditions in Belgium during the German Occupation of 1918."

"An act of goodness is of itself an act of happiness. No reward coming after the event can compare with the sweet reward that went with it."

"Each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand mediocre minds appointed to guard the past."

"Is it possible to find, in our human annals, words more majestic, more full of solemn anguish, more august in tone, more devout, more terrible? Where, from the depths of an agnosticism, which thousands of years have augmented, can we point to a wider horizon? At the very outset, it surpasses all that has been said, and goes farther than we shall even dare to go."

"Thanks to the labors of a science which is comparatively recent, and more especially to the researches of the students of Hindu and Egyptian antiquities, it is very much easier today than it was not so long ago to discover the source, to ascend the course and unravel the underground network of that great mysterious river which since the beginning of history has been flowing beneath all the religions, all the faiths, and all the philosophies: in a word, beneath all the visible and everyday manifestations of human thought. It is now hardly to be contested that this source is to be found in ancient India. Thence in all probability the sacred teaching spread into Egypt, found its way to ancient Persia and Chaldea, permeated the Hebrew race, and crept into Greece and the north of Europe, finally reaching China and even America."

"We possess, in the sacred and secret books of India, of which we know only an infinitesimal part, a cosmogony which no European conception has ever surpassed."

"We cannot tell how the religion of the Hindus came into being. When we become aware of it, we find it already complete in its broad outlines, its main principles. Not only is it complete, but the farther back we go, the more perfect it is, the more unadulterated, the more closely related to the loftiest speculations of our modern agnosticism."

"Quand nous perdons un être aimé, ce qui nous fait pleurer les larmes qui ne soulagent point, c'est le souvenir des moments où nous ne l'avons pas assez aimé."

"The truth that seems discouraging does in reality only transform the courage of those strong enough to accept it; and, in any event, a truth that disheartens, because it is true, is still of far more value than the most stimulating of falsehoods."

"It is not my purpose here to discuss the question of vegetarianism, or to meet the objections that may be urged against it; though it must be admitted that of these objections not one can withstand a loyal and scrupulous inquiry. I, for my part, can affirm that those whom I have known to submit themselves to this regimen have found its result to be improved or restored health, marked addition of strength, and the acquisition by the mind of a clearness, brightness, well-being, such as might follow the release from some secular, loathsome, detestable dungeon."

"For in truth all our justice, morality, all our thoughts and feelings, derive from three or four primordial necessities, whereof the principal one is food. The least modification of one of these necessities would entail a marked change in our moral existence. Were the belief one day to become general that man could dispense with animal food, there would ensue not only a great economic revolution--for a bullock, to produce one pound of meat, consumes more than a hundred of provender--but a moral improvement as well, not less important and certainly more sincere and more lasting than might follow a second appearance on the earth of the Envoy of the Father, come to remedy the errors and omissions of his former pilgrimage. For we find that the man who abandons the regimen of meat abandons alcohol also; and to do this is to renounce most of the coarser and more degraded pleasures of life. And it is in the passionate craving for these pleasures, in their glamour, and the prejudice they create, that the most formidable obstacle is found to the harmonious development of the race."

"This ideal is evidently still very imaginary, and may seem of but little importance; and infinite time must elapse, as in all other cases, before the certitude of those who are convinced that the race so far has erred in the choice of its aliment (assuming the truth of this statement to be borne out by experience) shall reach the confused masses, and bring them enlightenment and comfort. But may this not be the expedient Nature holds in reserve for the time when the struggle for life shall have become too hopelessly unbearable--the struggle for life that today means the fight for meat and for alcohol, double source of injustice and waste whence all the others are fed, double symbol of a happiness and necessity whereof neither is human?"

"I know that you are looking for the Blue Bird, that is to say, the great secret of things and of happiness, so that Man may make our servitude still harder. … I do not hear the Animals... Where are they?... All this concerns them as much as us... We, the Trees, must not assume the responsibility alone for the grave measures that have become necessary... On the day when Man hears that we have done what we are about to do, there will be terrible reprisals... It is right, therefore, that our agreement should be unanimous, so that our silence may be the same..."

"You know, my brothers, the nature of our business. The child you see before you, thanks to a talisman stolen from the powers of Earth, is able to take possession of the Blue Bird and thus to snatch from us the secret which we have kept since the origin of life... Now we know enough of Man to entertain no doubt as to the fate which he reserves for us once he is in possession of this secret. That is why it seems to me that any hesitation would be both foolish and criminal... It is a serious moment; the child must be done away with before it is too late..."

"Don't be alarmed … They are a little annoyed because Spring is late... Leave it to me; I will settle it all."

"He's not quite blue yet, but that will come, you shall see! … Take him off quick to your little girl..."

"Never mind... Don't cry... I will catch him again... [Stepping to the front of the stage and addressing the audience.] If any of you should find him, would you be so very kind as to give him back to us?... We need him for our happiness, later on..."

"It is childish to talk of happiness and unhappiness where infinity is in question. The idea which we entertain of happiness and unhappiness is something so special, so human, so fragile that it does not exceed our stature and falls to dust as soon as we go beyond its little sphere. It proceeds entirely from a few accidents of our nerves, which are made to appreciate very slight happenings, but which could as easily have felt everything the reverse way and taken pleasure in that which is now pain. We believe that we see nothing hanging over us but catastrophes, deaths, torments and disasters; we shiver at the mere thought of the great interplanetary spaces, with their cold and formidable and gloomy solitudes; and we imagine that the revolving worlds are as unhappy as ourselves because they freeze, or clash together, or are consumed in unutterable flames. We infer from this that the genius of the universe is an outrageous tyrant, seized with a monstrous madness, and that it delights only in the torture of itself and all that it contains. To millions of stars, each many thousand times larger than our sun, to nebulee whose nature and dimensions no figure, no word in our languages is able to express, we attribute our momentary sensibility, the little ephemeral and chance working of our nerves; and we are convinced that life there must be impossible or appalling, because we should feel too hot or too cold. It were much wiser to say to ourselves that it would need but a trifle, a few papilla more or less to our skin, the slightest modification of our eyes and ears, to turn the temperature, the silence and the darkness of space into a delicious spring-time, an unequalled music, a divine light. It were much more reasonable to persuade ourselves that the catastrophes which we think that we behold are life itself, the joy and one or other of those immense festivals of mind and matter in which death, thrusting aside at last our two enemies, time and space, will soon permit us to take part. Each world dissolving, extinguished, crumbling, burnt or colliding with another world and pulverized means the commencement of a magnificent experiment, the dawn of a marvelous hope and perhaps an unexpected happiness drawn direct from the inexhaustible unknown. What though they freeze or flame, collect or disperse, pursue or flee one another: mind and matter, no longer united by the same pitiful hazard that joined them in us, must rejoice at all that happens; for all is but birth and re-birth, a departure into an unknown filled with wonderful promises and maybe an anticipation of some unutterable event … And, should they stand still one day, become fixed and remain motionless, it will not be that they have encountered calamity, nullity or death; but they will have entered into a thing so fair, so great, so happy and bathed in such certainties that they will for ever prefer it to all the prodigious chances of an infinity which nothing can impoverish."

"When another writer in another house is not free, no writer is free."

"The question we writers are asked most often, the favorite question, is: Why do you write? I write because I have an innate need to write. I write because I can’t do normal work as other people do. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can partake of real life only by changing it. I write because I want others, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all life’s beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but—as in a dream—can’t quite get to. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy."

"I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the bottom of a well."

"Before my birth there was infinite time, and after my death, inexhaustible time. I never thought of it before: I'd been living luminously between two eternities of darkness."

"When you love a city and have explored it frequently on foot, your body, not to mention your soul, gets to know the streets so well after a number of years that in a fit of melancholy, perhaps stirred by a light snow falling ever so sorrowfully, you'll discover your legs carrying you of their own accord toward one of your favorite promontories."

"The drinking of coffee is an absolute sin! Our Glorious Prophet did not partake of coffee because he knew it dulled the intellect, caused ulcers, hernia and sterility; he understood that coffee was nothing but the Devil's ruse."

"Try to discover who I am from my choice of words and colors, as attentive people like yourselves might examine footprints to catch a thief."

"Where there is true art and genuine virtuosity the artist can paint an incomparable masterpiece without leaving even a trace of his identity."

"What was venerated as style was nothing more than an imperfection or flaw that revealed the guilty hand."

"Yet does illustrating in a new way signify a new way of seeing?"

"For if a lover's face survives emblazoned on your heart, the world is still your home."

"A letter doesn’t communicate by words alone. A letter, just like a book, can be read by smelling it, touching it and fondling it. Thereby, intelligent folk will say, “Go on then, read what the letter tells you!” whereas the dullwitted will say, “Go on then, read what he’s written!”"

"Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight."

"All great masters, in their work, seek that profound void within color and outside time."

"Tell me then, does love make one a fool or do only fools fall in love?"

"Are you an angel that approaching you should be so terrifying?"

"The beauty and mystery of this world only emerges through affection, attention, interest and compassion; if you want to live in that paradise where happy mares and stallions live, open your eyes wide and actually see this world by attending to its colors, details and irony."

"Books, which we mistake for consolation, only add depth to our sorrow."

"Let me first state forthright that contrary to what we've often read in books and heard from preachers, when you are a woman, you don't feel like the Devil."

"There are moments in all our lives when we realize, even as we experience them, that we are living through events we will never forget, even long afterward."

"T feel like the Devil not because I’ve murdered two men, but because my portrait has been made in this fashion."

"Suddenly, it seemed to me that the entire world was like a palace with countless rooms whose doors opened into one another. We were able to pass from one room to the next only by exercising our memories and imaginations, but most of us, in our laziness, rarely exercised these capacities, and forever remained in the same room."

"In actuality, we don’t look for smiles in pictures of bliss, but rather, for the happiness in life itself. Painters know this, but this is precisely what they cannot depict. That’s why they substitute the joy of seeing for the joy of life."

"New York is a woman holding, according to history, a rag called liberty with one hand and strangling the earth with the other."

"I wanted to break the linearity of poetic text to mess with it, if you will. The poem is meant to be a network rather than a single rope of thought."

"Poetry can only change the notion of relationships between things. Culture cannot change without a change in institutions."

"Ahora tenemos un peronismo que es todo: es la extrema derecha, es el centro, es el centro izquierda, es la extrema izquierda, es la democracia y es el terrorismo, es la demagogia y es la insensatez... Todo es el peronismo..."

"Political correctness is the enemy of freedom because it rejects honesty and authenticity. We have to tackle it as the distortion of the truth."

"It is easy to know what you want to say, but not to say it."

"Lima frightened him, it was too big, you could lose yourself in it and never find your way home; the people on the street were total strangers."

"He is always furious, on account of what he finds out or what he doesn't find out."

"Every thing is done halfway in Peru, and that is why everything goes wrong."

"When you start having bad luck, there isn't an end to it."

"We all believe in the regulations, but you have to know how to interpret them."

"You can't make facts fit the rules, it is the other way round. The rules have to be adopted to fit the facts."

"A clean conscience might help you to get into heaven. but it won't help your career."

"¿Tienen algo que ver con los intereses de los humildes las querellas retóricas de los partidos burgueses?"

"Reading changed dreams into life and life into dreams."

"Writing stories was not easy. When they were turned into words, projects withered on the paper and ideas and images failed. How to reanimate them? Fortunately, the masters were there, teachers to learn from and examples to follow. Flaubert taught me that talent is unyielding discipline and long patience. Faulkner, that form – writing and structure – elevates or impoverishes subjects. Martorell, Cervantes, Dickens, Balzac, Tolstoy, Conrad, Thomas Mann, that scope and ambition are as important in a novel as stylistic dexterity and narrative strategy. Sartre, that words are acts, that a novel, a play, or an essay, engaged with the present moment and better options, can change the course of history. Camus and Orwell, that a literature stripped of morality is inhuman, and Malraux that heroism and the epic are as possible in the present as is the time of the Argonauts, the Odyssey, and the Iliad."

"Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute – the foundation of the human condition – and should be better. We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal."

"Good literature erects bridges between different peoples, and by having us enjoy, suffer, or feel surprise, unites us beneath the languages, beliefs, habits, customs, and prejudices that separate us."

"Literature creates a fraternity within human diversity and eclipses the frontiers erected among men and women by ignorance, ideologies, religions, languages, and stupidity."

"[I]t is normal for outsiders to have a better understanding of what is happening inside dictatorial regimes, because censorship prevents those suffering under dictatorship from being fully aware of the situation in which they are living."

"[L]iberalism is above all an attitude toward life and society based on tolerance and respect, a love for culture, a desire to coexist with others and a firm defense of freedom as a supreme value. A freedom that is, at the same time, the driving force of material progress, of science, arts, and letters, and of a civilization that has produced sovereign individuals, with their independence, their rights, and their responsibilities that are always held in balance with those of other individuals, protected by a legal system that guarantees coexistence within diversity. Economic freedom is a key element of liberal doctrine but certainly not the only one."

"The only way to progress is by stumbling, falling, and getting up, time and again. Error will always be there because the best decisions are always, to some extent, bound up in error. In the great challenge of separating truth from lies—a goal, perhaps the most human of all goals, that is perfectly possible to achieve—it is essential to bear in mind that in this task there can never be definitive achievements that cannot be challenged later, and no knowledge that cannot be revised. In the great forest of misperceptions and deceptions, mistakes and mirages, through which we roam, the only way that truth can clear a path is by rational and systematic criticism of what is—or passes for—knowledge. Without this privileged expression of freedom, the right to criticize, we are condemned to oppression, brutality, and also obscurantism."

"At the dawn of human society there were no individuals, only the tribe, the closed society. The sovereign individual freed from this collective body that jealously closed in on itself in order to defend itself from wild animals, lightning bolts, evil spirits, and innumerable other fears of the primitive world, is a late creation of humanity. It takes shape with the appearance of the critical spirit—with the discovery that the world and life are problems that can and must be solved—that is, with the development of rationalism and the right to exercise this rationalism independent of religious and political authorities."

"In May 1968 in France there was student unrest at the University of Nanterre, which then spread to the Sorbonne, to the remaining universities in the country, and to colleges and schools. This is how the "student revolution" began, and it sparked similar movements in different parts, which is why it became so important the world over. Nearly sixty years on, such a reaction seems excessive when one considers its real significance: it led to a certain freedom in behavior, especially sexual freedom, the disappearance of standards of polite behavior, the multiplication of swear words in communication, and not much more."

"We live in the civilization of the spectacle and the intellectuals and writers who are the most popular are almost never popular because of the originality of their ideas or the beauty of their creations, or, in any event, not just for intellectual, artistic, or literary reasons. They are popular above all else for their histrionic ability, the way in which they project their public image, their exhibitionism, their rudeness, their insolence, all that farcical and noisy dimension of public life that passes itself off as rebellion (but which, in fact, masks a complete conformism)."

"[C]ommon sense is the most valuable of political virtues."

"True progress, which has forced back or overthrown barbarous practices and institutions that were the source of infinite suffering for men and women, and has established more civilized relations and styles of life, has always been achieved through a partial, heterodox, distorted application of social theories. Social theories, in the plural, which means that different and even irreconcilable ideological systems have brought about identical or similar forms of progress. The prerequisite was always that these systems should be flexible and could be amended or reformed when they moved from the abstract to the concrete and came up against the daily experience of human beings. The filter at work that separates what is desirable from what is not desirable in these systems is the criterion of practical reason."

"[T]here is literally no bastion of knowledge, not even in the exact sciences, that ideology, with its powers of distortion, cannot breach and into which lies useful to the cause cannot be implanted."

"There are certain disciplines—linguistics, philosophy, and literary and art criticism, for example—that seem particularly suited to performing the con of converting the pretentious verbiage of certain modish arrivistes into fashionable human science. To confront this type of deception requires not only the courage to swim against the tide but also having a solid cultural background in many areas of knowledge. The genuine humanist tradition […] is the only thing that can stop, or at least temper, the harmful effects on the cultural life of a country of these deformations—lack of science, pseudo-knowledge, artifice that passes itself off as creative thought—that are the unequivocal signs of its decline."

"I belong to the first generation of Latin American writers brought up reading other Latin American writers. Before my time the work of Latin American writers was not well distributed, even on our continent. In Chile it was very hard to read other writers from Latin America. My greatest influences have been all the great writers of the Latin American Boom in literature: García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Cortázar, Borges, Paz, Rulfo, Amado, etc."

"Vargas Llosa, buen escritor y mal político"

"Antes de la elección de ayer en Brasil, hace como 15 días se reunieron en España, no sólo Zedillo y Calderón, sino Aznar y el juez que injustamente encarceló a Lula y convocó Mario Vargas Llosa, y ¿de qué sirvió? Es hablar de populismo en general, pero llevaba un mensaje, se hace el encuentro en vísperas de las elecciones en Brasil, y ¿qué pasó ayer en Brasil? Ganó Lula. ¿En cuánto ayudan ellos? Nada. Al contrario, Vargas Llosa parece que todo lo que toca lo sala."

"The facade of the Conquest, severe yet jocund, with one foot in the dead Old World and the other in the New."

"What the United States does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is understand others."

"The North American world blinds us with its energy; we cannot see ourselves, we must see you."

"Don't classify me, read me. I'm a writer, not a genre."

"If the Soviet Union can give up the Brezhnev Doctrine for the Sinatra Doctrine, the United States can give up the James Monroe Doctrine for the Marilyn Monroe Doctrine: Let's all go to bed wearing the perfume we like best."

"I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them."

"No government functions without the grease of corruption."

"[The Mexican revolution] was a break with the past to recover the past. We were trying to deny we had an Indian and a black and a Spanish past. The Mexican Revolution accepted all heritages. It allowed Mexico to be mestizo."

"Can you imagine me coming to this country to blow up a post office? I told them, "My bombs are my books.""

"A tropical Mussolini"

"I was influenced by all of them-by García Márquez, by Carlos Fuentes, [[Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, José Donoso, so many of them-some of my own generation, like Eduardo Galeano. It's easy for me to write because I don't have to invent anything. They already found a voice, a way of telling us to ourselves, so it's easy."

"I admire him a lot. He has done a lot to bring the Latin American situation to the American consciousness."

"Cortázar is the one who is closest to my way of understanding the act of writing. And nearer to my heart. I admire Carlos Fuentes on the opposite extreme of the equation. That is why I wrote a book on both of them, Entrecruzamientos: Cortázar/Fuentes."

"Nothing helped; I was fading helplessly away with open eyes, staring straight at the ceiling. Finally I stuck my forefinger in my mouth and took to sucking on it. Something began stirring in my brain, some thought in there scrambling to get out, a stark-staring mad idea: what if I gave a bite? And without a moment's hesitation I squeezed my eyes shut and clenched my teeth together. I jumped up. I was finally awake."

"And love became the world's origin and the world's ruler, yet littered its path is with flowers and blood, flowers and blood."

"In old age... we are like a batch of letters that someone has sent. We are no longer in the past, we have arrived."

"I am not worthy to speak loudly of Adolf Hitler, nor do his life and deeds call for sentimental arousal. He was a warrior, a warrior for mankind, and a preacher of the gospel of justice for all nations. He was a reformer of the highest order, and his historical fate was that he lived in a time of unequalled cruelty, which felled him in the end. Thus the ordinary Western European may look upon Adolf Hitler. And we, his close followers, bow our heads at his death."

"It was in those days when I wandered about hungry in Kristiania, that strange city which no one leaves before it has set its mark upon him. . . ."

"I sit there on the bench and write 1848 dozens of times; I write this number criss-cross in all possible shapes and wait for a usable idea to occur to me. A swarm of loose thoughts is fluttering about in my head. The mood of the dying day makes me despondent and sentimental. Autumn has arrived and has already begun to put everything into a deep sleep; flies and other insects have suffered their first setback, and up in the trees and down on the ground you can hear the sounds of struggling life, pottering, ceaselessly rustling, labouring not to perish. All crawling things are stirring once more; they stick their yellow heads out of the moss, lift their legs and grope their way with their long feelers, before they suddenly give out, rolling over and turning up their bellies. Every growing thing has received its distinctive mark, a gentle breath of the first frost; the grass stems, stiff and pale, strain upwards towards the sun, and the fallen leaves rustle along the ground with a sound like that of wandering silkworms. It's autumn, the very carnival of transience; the roses have an inflamed flush, their blood-red colour tinged with a wonderfully hectic hue. I felt I was myself a crawling insect doomed to perish, seized by destruction in the midst of a whole world ready to go to sleep."

"Suddenly one or two good sentences occur to me, suitable for a sketch or story, nice linguistic flukes the likes of which I had never experienced before. I lie there repeating these words to myself and find that they are excellent. Presently they're joined by others, I'm at once wide awake, sit up and grab paper and pencil from the table behind my bed. It was as though a vein had burst inside me - one word follows another, they connect with one another and turn into situations; scenes pile on top of other scenes, actions and dialogue well up in my brain, and a wonderful sense of pleasure takes hold of me. I write as if possessed, filling one page after another without a moment's pause. My thoughts strike me so suddenly and continue to pour out so abundantly that I lose a lot of minor details I'm not able to write down fast enough, though I am working at full blast. They continue to crowd in on me, I am full of my subject, and every word I write is put in my mouth. It goes on and on, it takes such a wonderfully long time before this singular moment ceases to be; I have 15 to 20 written pages lying on my knees in front of me when I finally stop and put my pencil away. Now, if these pages were really worth something, then I was saved!"

"I walked very slowly, passed Majorstuen, continued onward, always onward, walked for hours, and finally got out to the Bogstad Woods. Here I stepped off the road and sat down to rest. Then I busied myself looking for a likely place, began to scrape together some heather and juniper twigs and made a bed on a small slope where it was fairly dry, opened my parcel and took out the blanket. I was tired and fagged out from the long walk and went to bed at once. I tossed and turned many times before I finally got settled; my ear hurt - it was a bit swollen from the blow of the fellow on the hay load and I couldn't lie on it. I took off my shoes and placed them under my head, with the big wrapping paper on top of them. A brooding darkness was all around me. Everything was still, everything. But up aloft soughed the eternal song of wind and weather, that remote, tuneless hum which is never silent. I listened so long to this endless, faint soughing that it began to confuse me; it could only be the symphonies coming from the whirling worlds above me, the stars intoning a hymn. . . ."

"Here I was walking around so hungry that my intestines were squirming inside me like snakes, and I had no guarantee there would be something in the way of food later in the day either. And as time went on I was getting more and more hollowed out, spiritually and physically, and I stooped to less and less honourable actions every day. I lied without blushing to get my way, cheated poor people out of their rent, even had to fight off the thought, mean as could be, of laying hands on other people's blankets, all without remorse, without a bad inner conscience. Rotten patches were beginning to appear in my inner being, black spongy growths that were spreading more and more. And God sat up in his heaven keeping a watchful eye on me, making sure that my destruction took place according to all the rules of the game, slowly and steadily, with no let-up. But in the pit of hell the devils were raising their hackles in fury because it was taking me such a long time to commit a cardinal sin, an unforgivable sin for which God in his righteousness had to cast me down. . . ."

"If only one had a piece of bread! One of those delicious little loaves of rye bread that you could munch on as you walked the streets. And I kept picturing to myself just the sort of rye bread it would have been good to have. I was bitterly hungry, wished myself dead and gone, grew sentimental and cried. There would never be an end to my misery! [...] My hunger pains were excruciating and didn't leave me for a moment. [...] I hadn't had enough to eat for many, many weeks before this thing came up, and my strength had diminished considerably lately. [...] And hadn't I lived like a miser, eaten bread and milk when I had plenty, bread when I had little, and gone hungry when I had nothing? [...] I reviled myself for my poverty, shouted epithets at myself, invented insulting names, priceless treasures of coarse abusive language that I heaped on myself. I kept this up until I was nearly home."

"I passed my hand up along my cheeks: thin - of course I was thin, my cheeks were like two bowls with the bottoms in. Oh Lord! I shuffled on. But I stopped again. I must be just incredibly thin. My eyes were sinking deep into my skull. What, exactly, did I look like? The devil only knew why you had to be turned into a veritable freak just because of hunger! I experienced rage once more, its final flare-up, a spasm. God help us, what a face, eh? Here I was, with a head on my shoulders without its equal in the whole country, and with a pair of fists, by golly, that could grind the town porter to fine dust, and yet I was turning into a freak from hunger, right here in the city of Kristiania! Was there any rhyme or reason in that? I had put my shoulders to the wheel and toiled day and night, like a nag lugging a parson; I had read till my eyes were bursting from their sockets and starved till my wits took leave of my brain - and where the hell had it gotten me? Even the streetwalkers prayed to God to free them from the sight of me. But now it was going to stop, understand; it was going to stop, or I'd be damned! . . ."

"Then, one afternoon, one of my articles was finished at last and, pleased and happy, I stuck it in my pocket and went up to the 'Commander'. It was high time I bestirred myself to get some money again. I didn't have very many øre left. [...] He takes the papers out of my hand and starts leafing through them. He turns his face in my direction. [...] "Everything we can use must be so popular," he answers. "You know the sort of public we have. Couldn't you try to make it a bit simpler? Or else come up with something that people understand better?""

"Good God, what an awful state I was in! I was so thoroughly sick and tired of my whole wretched life that I didn't find it worth my while to go on fighting in order to hang onto it. The hardships had got the better of me, they had been too gross; I was so strangely ruined, nothing but a shadow of what I once was. My shoulders had slumped completely to one side, and I had fallen into the habit of leaning over sharply when I walked, in order to spare my chest what little I could. I had examined my body a few days ago, at noon up in my room, and I had stood there and cried over it the whole time. I had been wearing the same shirt for weeks on end, it was stiff with old sweat and had gnawed my naval to bits."

"Closing the door, I opened a suitcase and took out a copy of Knut Hamsun's Hunger. It was a treasured piece, constantly with me since the day I stole it from the Boulder library. I had read it so many times that I could recite it."

"Uma obscura e inquieta castidade: pôs uma flor para mim no jardim mais secreto num horizonte de graça e claridade intangível e perto.'Promessa estática no luar da densidade em mim corpórea. não é a culpa, é a memoria da primeira manhã do pecado sem Eva e sem Adão.'Só o fruto provado e a serpente enroscada na minha solidão."

"錦濤先生，作爲一個臺灣人，我實在不在乎團團和圓圓來不來臺北，雖然熊貓可愛得令人融化。"

"民主是什麼？民主就是發表了任何意見不怕有人秋後算賬；民主就是權利被侵犯的時候可以理直氣壯地討回，不管你是什麼階級什麼身份；民主就是不必效忠任何黨，不必討好任何人..."

"If one day I have a stroke, then that will tell me that being ROC Culture Minister is not worth it for me. As long as I am still in this position, I will definitely do my best until one day when I decide that it is not worth it anymore."

"Working in the government nowadays, you can only get things done if you have the determination to go against the prevailing trend."

"The motto of science is not just Pauca but rather Plurima ex paucissimis — the most out of the least."

"A definitely undesirable rationale sustaining the cult of simplicity is of a metaphysical nature: namely, the wish to attain the ultimate atoms of experience and/or reality ... this drive, which feeds metaphysical fundamentalism, is dangerous because it leads to postulating the final simplicity of some form of experience or some kind of substance thereby barring any inquiry into their structure."

"Logical positivism was progressive compared with the classical positivism of Ptolemy, Hume, d'Alembert, Compte, John Stuart Mill, and Ernst Mach. It was even more so by comparison with its contemporary rivals—, , , , , and existentialism. However, neo-positivism failed dismally to give a faithful account of science, whether natural or social. It failed because it remained anchored to sense-data and to a phenomenalist metaphysics, overrated the power of induction and underrated that of hypothesis, and denounced realism and materialism as metaphysical nonsense. Although it has never been practiced consistently in the advanced natural sciences and has been criticized by many philosophers, notably Popper (1959 [1935], 1963), logical positivism remains the tacit philosophy of many scientists. Regrettably, the anti-positivism fashionable in the metatheory of social science is often nothing but an excuse for sloppiness and wild speculation."

"We all would to know more and, at the same time, to receive less information. In fact, the problem of a worker in today's knowledge industry is not the scarcity of information but its excess. The same holds for professionals: just think of a physician or an executive, constantly bombarded by information that is at best irrelevant. In order to learn anything we need time. And to make time we must use information filters allowing us to ignore most of the information aimed at us. We must ignore much to learn a little."

"If one aims to judge political movements, their deeds are far more important than their speeches, which are often masking rather than revealing."

"When in the sciences or techniques one states that a certain problem is unsolvable, a rigorous demonstration of such unsolvability is required. And when a scientist submits an article to publication, the least that its referees demand is that it be intelligible. Why? Because rational beings long for understanding and because only clear statements are susceptible to be put to examination to verify whether they are true or false. In the Humanities it is the same, or it should be, but it is not always so. Nietzsche reproached John Stuart Mill's clarity. Henri Bergson, although an intuitionist himself, wrote clearly and declared that "clarity is the philosopher's courtesy". Obscurity is rude, because it assumes the interlocutor is incapable of understanding and dialoguing."

"Bunge: In September I will be 90 years old. Reporter: You look very youthful. Bunge: That's because I avoid alcohol, tobacco, and postmodernism."

"The fact that a great many scientists signed Faustian pacts with the war devil throughout the twentieth century has given science a bad name, and has discouraged many able youngsters from pursuing a scientific career."

"In academia much bogus knowledge is tolerated in the name of academic freedom – which is like allowing for the sale of contaminated food in the name of free enterprise. I submit that such tolerance is suicidal: that the serious students must be protected against the “anything goes” crowd."

"At all times pseudoprofound aphorisms have been more popular than rigorous arguments."

""Into the half light and shadow go I. Within my head"

"I am a weary heart surrounded by life's frothy ocean."

"Always another path you seek: today I seek no more."

"Although personal calling I sense—who am I? even if I am, I don't know."

"And what does infinity mean to you? Are you not infinity and yourself?"

"The closer he moved, the farther it seemed still."

"There is nobody to wake up eternal seekers."

"The farther away, the closer the home becomes."

"I can see myself before myself—a being through dark scenery."

"Into the day as by dream I swim to the music of nourished meaning."

"The world contained in a seed is determined by its program."

"There are no clear borders, only merging invisible to the sight."

"Life into death—life’s other shape, no rupture, only crossing."

"You are hurrying to the sweet place, to the nonsense chasing your spirit and in the nonsense you look for answers."

"The world is always open, waiting to be discovered."

"Will the day tell its secret before it disappears, becomes timeless night."

"When the star dies, its eye closes; tired of watching, it flies back to its first bright dream."

"In the end, the world returns to a grain."

"When magic through nerves and reason passes, imagination, force, and passion will thunder. The portrait of the world is changed."

"To jump over centuries in one step is impossible. Jump too high or far, you’ll be way too late."

"A hidden spark of the dream sleeps in the forest and waits in the celestial spheres of the brain."

"All dust is the same dust. Temporarily separated to go peacefully and enjoy the eternal nap."

"To the knights of faith nobody believes."

"New Rome will be destroyed by the attacks of new vandals."

"God always remains silent."

"New vandals will destroy what former vandals failed to abolish."

"Vandals listen only when others are stronger. If vandals are equal or stronger, their word is the last word."

"Deliver thunder, God, if you choose not to talk."

"All swallows all. Life must eat life to survive."

"Life eats life to live."

"Neither alive nor dead; no one lets up, no one wins."

"Death swallows death."

"A word only writes its night and rides its dream."

"There are countless circles of hell; believers never penetrate the ninth circle."

"Cosmos is God, who whispered the syllable of life."

"Life is only a flicker of melted ice."

"Stars are only the rain of the Absolute."

"God is a cloud from which rain fell."

"Darkness does not age; nothing is always nothing."

"In the essence of truth lies deceit. Deceit dispels the boredom of the Absolute."

"Absolute is a game with only one player where Absolute forgets itself so it would have a reason to fulfill the motion while returning."

"Absolute equals nothingness."

"Omnipotence and omniscience are the end of power and knowledge."

"Everything and nothing are the same in the Absolute."

"Procreation annihilates eternity."

"Existence is the end of endless eternity without a beginning or an end."

"Unborn eternity does not die; existence is dying and falls asleep in the eternity beyond existence."

"Eternity is a glorious word but eternity is ice."

"Knighthood lies above eternity; it doesn’t live off fame, but rather deeds."

"Our eternity is not real; it resembles us; it is our own invention; its scent is vanity."

"When following God, Zero we never find."

"Infinity is the end. End without infinity is but a new beginning."

"The world is God’s salvation."

"Sun is a hearthstone, a merry-go-round of extinguished hearthstones."

"Universe is the Sun watching its own self."

"The world is a fairy tale; we are its guardians."

"Two forces create eternity – a fairy tale and a dream from the fairy tale."

"God is busy and has no time for you."

"Get close to grass and you’ll see a star."

"Arrival in the world is really a departure and that, which we call departure, is only a return."

"The same word we love and hate, leaves in different directions, taking different paths."

"Through words to the meaning of thoughts with no words."

"Different languages, the same thoughts; servant to thoughts and their masters."

"How many unuttered words died in the heads of those for whom a word was too expensive."

"Everybody talks, but there is no conversation."

"We hear only our own voices, still echoes returning to our emptiness."

"When the long bygone Lee Po wanted to say something, he could do it with only a few words."

"We forget old stories, but those stories remain the same."

"How alive is thought, invisible, yet without thought there is no sight."

"The deeper thought is, the taller it becomes."

"A smiling lie is a whirlwind, easy to enter, but hard to escape."

"Truth is hard-hearted and unrelenting, too clear, precise; a lie is much more imaginative."

"In the lie of truth lies the truth."

"Teaching others, he corrected himself."

"He did not waste time in a vain search for a place in history."

"After Homer and Dante, is a whole century of creating worth one Shakespeare?"

"How does one say something new and not retell?"

"Either all lights are turned off or one inner light is missing."

"He did not profess to anybody how to reach others without professing."

"You not only are hunted by others, you unknowingly hunt yourself."

"Do not look too far for you will see nothing."

"Either you will be you or you will not be at all."

"We need knew knights, but without swords."

"Come out from within yourself, speak out."

"Say No! Accept the burdens of revenge."

"Wherever there is somebody else, a war is not far away."

"Even if you are alone you wage war with yourself."

"A breeze, a forgotten summer, a smile, all can fit into a storefront window."

"We built tall buildings, but we have not become any taller."

"Whatever others may say, they say it to deceive and comfort themselves, not help you."

"His Highness was always confident in his statements, especially about what he viewed for the first time."

"Now that we are all so smart, we don’t easily find resolutions."

"He thought others were small; that was his greatness."

"This dwarf still observes the world from his own self-imposed height."

"If you could have walked on the planet before humans lived here, maybe the Ivory Coast would have seemed more beautiful than La Côte d'Azur."

"We measure everything by ourselves with almost a necessary conceit."

"There are no winners in real games."

"The game itself is bigger than the winning."

"Serious affairs and history are carefully laid snares for the uninformed."

"Creators of history always play with our impotence and our ignorance."

"You mark and celebrate errors, transforming failures into successes."

"Statesmen are grocers, ambitious clowns."

"For a game, you don’t need a teacher."

"Faith is a question of eyesight; even the blind can see that."

"Holy books are an insult to a God with good intentions."

"The universe is God’s son."

"Christ did not ask or want to be what he was not."

"Burning the witch Giordano Bruno is one more wound inflicted on Christ’s body."

"Your head is a lit chamber."

"The light teaches you to convert life into a festive promenade."

"What we call life is only talk of nature."

"Nothing is inanimate; what is the rest is our interpretation."

"We like to admit to only that which already glows, although it is nobler to support brightness before it glows, not afterwards."

"It is easy to see the glow but hard to recognize the awakening of silence."

"Disease often comes with a smiling face."

"Strangers are endearing because you don’t know them yet."

"He confided his deepest secret to you; be always wary of his secret."

"Don’t pay attention to those who offer too much."

"Is it possible to write a poem or are these words just screams of outlaws exiled to the desert?"

"It’s not easy to write a poem about a poem."

"You don’t know anything, but I know even less."

"If you are good, they say you are weak."

"If what we think of ourselves were true, the planet would overflow with geniuses. They blossomed; they did not talk about blossoming. They grew; they did not talk about growing."

"Pose your questions to people and you will get countless useless answers."

"From whichever side I start, I think I am in an old place where others have been before me."

"For a moment at least, be a smile on someone else’s face."

"Beyond all vanities, fights, and desires, omnipotent silence lies."

"There are many secrets; don’t try to resolve them all."

"To sense the peace of extinguished passion, happiness in not knowing the ultimate knowledge."

"If emptiness is empty, how can something be borne or awaken from it?"

"If emptiness is endless, then everything rests in emptiness."

"Nothing is part of everything."

"Without nothing, everything would be nothing."

"From everything, nothing looks to nothing."

"From nothing comes everything."

"When everything hurries everywhere, nothing goes anywhere."

"When he is most powerful, nothing does he become."

"To come to nothing through something is the way to outside from both sides."

"Digressions are part of harmony, deviations too."

"Earth is the source of light."

"Every star was once darker than the night, before it awoke."

"We will go far away, To nowhere, To conquer, To fertilize, Until we become tired; Then we will stop And there will be our home."

"One hand I extend into myself, the other toward others."

"I recreate myself; that is my only power."

"I enjoy it when the world smiles; the more smiles, the warmer I am."

"You ask how it is possible To be your own father and son. You should seek answers, Although it is better to anticipate some, To be the light and dream."

"And this that you call solitude is in fact a big crowd."

"Creating means living."

"Instead of imitating me, you simply loiter."

"I am the shore and the ocean, awaiting myself on both sides."

"I travel, always arriving in the same place."

"If I would really start talking, you would become silent."

"My mathematics is simple: one plus one = one."

"With me: one minus one = one; with you: it’s zero. Here lies the only difference."

"I don’t know if you are me or I am neither I nor you."

"I lose faith in mathematics, logical and rigid. What with those that even zero doesn’t accept?"

"Mathematics doesn’t care about those beyond the numbers."

"Through everything I have passed but nowhere I have been."

"In the biggest and the smallest I sleep but at the same place I stay."

"Wherever I go, I run into myself."

"In a myriad of ways you tell one truth."

"From one bell all the bells toll."

"What you gain here, you lose on the other side."

"Long ago we conquered our passions Looking at ourselves in the mirror of eternity."

"Long ago an uncalled rain fell And a called-upon God stayed equally distant."

"While gazing at myself from yourself, I was beautiful."

"He will understand when it is too late that it is easier to love."

"We don’t know anything about silent sages, buried knowledge, the eye of the mute poet, serene seers, yet how many talkative destroyers, prophets and ideologues, teachers and beautifiers there are on the other side."

"Nothing is made, Nothing disappears. The same changes, At the same places, Never stopping. The foundation and the roof With the world between Dreaming."

"Life and death merge in greatness."

"They are both spectacular, life and death."

"The world is a navy in an empty ocean."

"Good is not always good."

"Devil and God are two sides of the same face."

"The holy world glows like a lightening bug."

"In every sound sleeps the silence."

"In an endless silence even screams sound silent."

"In every moment the past is born and the present flows into the future, taking the moment that already passed."

"While the world sleeps, darkness and silence are awake."

"Heavenly bodies are nests of invisible birds."

"It is futile to spend time telling stories about the fleetness of each day."

"It is vain futility to analyze the algebra of time."

"Color is the overpowering of black; white – the final victory over black."

"From what you didn’t say, lies that you did say."

"The eyesight for an eagle is what thought is to a man."

"When within yourself you find the road, the right road will open."

"The world cannot be translated; it can only be dreamed of and touched."

"Through a forest of challenges, thought moves and squirms, resisting beguilements; if it endures, it emerges pure."

"Every scent is the sun’s scent."

"With open eyes, you watch; with closed eyes, you see."

"Description is a story well told already; experience offers truth."

"What you spend, you save."

"Forget decorated generals, tell me about Private Ryan."

"Tell me something only you know and make a new friend."

"Without space, there is no time."

"Before the first before and after the last after, there is night waiting."

"Accidents are not accidents but precise arrivals at the wrong right time."

"Love is almost never simple."

"Too often, feelings arrive too soon, waiting for thoughts that often come too late."

"Our desire to say more grows bigger and what to say about it, except that saying is not always about saying, growing is not always about growing."

"A big desire is not enough to meet the expectations of lost dreams."

"To transform a grimace into a sound sounds impossible, yet it is possible to transform a vision into music, to go outside an enslaved personality, to become impersonal by transforming into sand, into water, into light."

"There can be no forced inspiration."

"Although all days are equally long regardless of the season, some days are long not only seasonally but by rewards they offer."

"There is a moonlight note in the Moonlight Sonata; there is a thunder note in an angry sky."

"Sound unbound by nature becomes bounded by art."

"There is no competition of sounds between a nightingale and a violin."

"Art is apotheosis; often, the complaint of beauty."

"Nature is an outcry, unpolished truth; the art—a euphemism—tamed wilderness."

"If birth is a manifestation of life, death is another."

"Every thought about death takes a moment of life away."

"History will be erased in the universal purgatory."

"Dreams are our only geography—our native land."

"Even great men bow before the Sun; it melts hubris into humility."

"He had an answer to almost everything and he retired at an early age."

"A word into the silence thrown always finds its echo somewhere where silence opens hidden lexicons."

"Be aware of the high notes, of the blissful faces and their soft messages, and listen for the silent message of a highly decorated gift."

"They will smile, as they always do when they plan a major attack late in the night."

"He tries to find the exit from himself but there is no door."

"Dust to dust, ashes to ashes. Is that all?"

"My feelings are too loud for words and too shy for the world."

"There is another alphabet, whispering from every leaf, singing from every river, shimmering from every sky."

"I fly through memory to find a newborn love."

"Trying too hard to be too good, even when trying to be bad, is too good for the bad, too bad for the good."

"Perfection seems sterile; it is final, no mystery in it; it's a product of an assembly line."

"To accomplish the perfect perfection, a little imperfection helps."

"Entering a cell, penetrating deep as a flying saucer to find a new galaxy would be an honorable task for a new scientist interested more in the inner state of the soul than in outer space."

"Senses empower limitations, senses expand vision within borders, senses promote understanding through pleasure."

"Without pleasure there is no sight or measure."

"Total knowledge is annihilation of the desire to see, to touch, to feel the world sensed only through senses and immune to the knowledge without feeling."

"Great poets are great copy editors."

"There is no born lover, there is no born Don Juan, for we are all lovers."

"To dream on occasion is not dreaming; to love on occasion is not love."

"There is something perfect to be found in the imperfect: the law keeps balance through the juxtaposition of beauty, which gains perfection through nurtured imperfection."

"Everything that looks too perfect is too perfect to be perfect."

"We love the imperfect shapes in nature and in the works of art, look for an intentional error as a sign of the golden key and sincerity found in true mastery."

"When all is lost, there is still a memory."

"Oblivion cures the old wounds."

"Fly without wings; dream with open eyes."

"In trying to be perfect, he perfected the art of anonymity."

"If an ancient man saw planes two thousand years ago, he would've thought they were birds or angels from another world."

"When there is noise and crowds, there is trouble; when everything is silent and perfect, there is just perfection and nothing to fill the air."

"Why poetry, you ask? Because of life, I answer."

"Possible impossibility emerges from an impossible possibility, or possibly, impossible possibility blooms from the impossibly possible impossibility."

"Possible is more a matter of attitude, a matter of decision, to choose among the impossible possibilities, when one sound opportunity becomes a possible solution."

"Those who hate rain hate life."

"Nothing reminds us of an awakening more than rain."

"Pretense cannot sustain blind power."

"Courage is more important than to be deceived by shallow victory waiting for a delayed defeat."

"It is not possible to express the most precious insights, To see all that craves to be seen, To visit even the closest neighbors in the universe, To learn all that needs to be learned, To live without dying, And I am sad about it. But I lived And I am happy about that."

"Dream by making and make by dreaming."

"Busy with the ugliness of the expensive success we forget the easiness of free beauty lying sad right around the corner, only an instant removed, unnoticed and squandered."

"Since nothing is absolute, there is no absolute silence, only an appearance of temporary peace."

"Since there is no real silence, silence will contain all the sounds, all the words, all the languages, all knowledge, all memory."

"Get out, but don't cause unneeded accidents."

"If unjustified, ambition kills value, eats its own life, kills someone else's desire to fly, cuts their wings, sucks their air."

"There is only as much space, only as much time, only as much desire, only as many words, only as many pages, only as much ink to accept all of us at light-speed hurrying into the Promised Land of oblivion that is waiting for us sooner or later."

"The most complicated skill is to be simple."

"To say more while saying less is the secret of being simple."

"To not say all that can be said is the secret of discipline and economy."

"To leave out beautiful sunsets is the secret of good taste."

"To hide feelings when you are near crying is the secret of dignity."

"To cut and tighten sentences is the secret of mastery."

"To keep the air fresh among words is the secret of verbal cleanliness."

"To write good poems is the secret of brevity."

"To go against the grain is the secret of bravery."

"To risk life to save a smile on a face of a woman or a child is the secret of chivalry."

"To go where no one else has ever gone before is the secret of heroism."

"To expect to be kissed having bad breath is the secret of a fool."

"Words rich in meaning can be cheap in sound effects."

"Every man needs his Siren to check his courage and strength when he hears her song in his travels through the unknown."

"We traveled long and forgot why poetry was invented."

"I imagined I was God for a millisecond and became speechless for a long time."

"A star needs a star."

"When I want to be reminded of stupidity, especially my own, I turn on the TV."

"To hear never-heard sounds, To see never-seen colors and shapes, To try to understand the imperceptible Power pervading the world; To fly and find pure ethereal substances That are not of matter But of that invisible soul pervading reality. To hear another soul and to whisper to another soul; To be a lantern in the darkness Or an umbrella in a stormy day; To feel much more than know. To be the eyes of an eagle, slope of a mountain; To be a wave understanding the influence of the moon; To be a tree and read the memory of the leaves; To be an insignificant pedestrian on the streets Of crazy cities watching, watching, and watching. To be a smile on the face of a woman And shine in her memory As a moment saved without planning."

"I visited many places, some of them quite exotic and far away, but I always returned to myself."

"Based on the law of probability, everything is possible because the sheer existence of possibility confirms the existence of impossibility."

"To understand possible means to understand impossible."

"It is beautiful to talk about beautiful things and even more beautiful to silently gaze at them."

"It is beautiful to express love and even more beautiful to feel it."

"Beauty is a cheap word, but beauty remains priceless."

"(Breaking) ritual habit, ritual normality that seals our eyes and ears…you can advance, see things you never saw before, move out of boundaries that have been a prison."

"The solid morning mist began to disintegrate and dark shoulders of rock appeared in the water giving the illusion of swimmers, reaching from bank to bank, dispersing from themselves wreaths of snakes with imperceptible strokes."

"The flute sings of an ancient riverbead one hundred fathoms deep, far below the Potaro River that runs to the Waterfall. Two rivers then. The visible Potaro runs to the Waterfall. The invisible stream of the river of the dead runs far below, far under our knees. The flute tells of the passage of the drowned river of the dead and the river of the living are one quantum stream possessed of four banks."

"Once cannot tame the voices of the flute, voices of such uncanny lightness yet miracle of being that they are able to tilt the two rivers, the visible and the invisible rivers, into diagrammatic discourse; and in so doing to create the four banks of the river of space into a ladder upon which the curved music of the flute ascends. Those banks are dislodged upwards into rungs in the ladder and into stepping stones into original space."

"There is no economic solution to the ills of the world until the arts of originality […] open the partialities and biases of tradition in ways that address the very core of our pre-possessions."

"It is not only the gulf between religions and cultures that plaques us today. There is the widening gulf between the rich and the poor, the world of plenty and the world of famine. We may think we can make a good patch work or mechanical arrangement to ameliorate such a division. But this I feel is an illusion. There is no economic solution to the ills of the world until the arts of originality - arts that are driven by mysterious strangeness - open the partialities and bias of tradition in ways that address the very core of our pre-possessions.""

"Cross-culturality differs radically from multiculturality. There is no creative and re-creative sharing of dimensions in multiculturality."

"“Quantum” brings a hand in fiction that challenges all conventional fixtures of control within the psyche of art."

"In America today there are many “colored” people who are designated “black” or “African.” Whereas they are mixed with the West—with the so-called whites who represent the West—in blood and spirit. This is a fateful, hidden matter though we do not see it as such. It may be partly responsible for deadly, one-sided polarizations in cultures around the globe that see themselves similarly locked into racial investitures."

"I am not suggesting that racial admixture is a solution to the world’s grave problems. I am suggesting, however, that a freedom of diverse parts in Nature to blend into variant universals should be open in fiction and art."

"The entertainment industry makes this [phantasmagoria of distraction] easier by elevating the person to the level of the commodity. He surrenders to its manipulations while enjoying his alienation from himself and others. The enthronement of the commodity, with its lustre of distraction…is consistent with the split between utopian and cynical elements."

"They're hardly given to conventional writers, and a writer like myself is hardly given a knighthood."

"My writing is quantum writing. Do you know of the quantum bullet? The quantum bullet, when it's fired, leaves not one hole but two. That's how my writing is."

"So I feel that this is an encouragement to other writers in the region to persist in the their work, even if they feel that what they are doing is not popular, because in the long run it may tell on their behalf."

"The arts have to be pursued irrespective of what people think."

"What can art accomplish? The purpose of art is to accumulate the human within the human being."

"Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one's ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone—the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there's no fairness on earth."

"Is there anything more frightening than people?"

"I used to think I could understand everything and express everything. Or almost everything. I remember when I was writing my book about the war in Afghanistan, Zinky Boys, I went to Afghanistan and they showed me some of the foreign weapons that had been captured from the Afghan fighters. I was amazed at how perfect their forms were, how perfectly a human thought had been expressed. There was an officer standing next to me and he said, "If someone were to step on this Italian mine that you say is so pretty it looks like a Christmas decoration, there would be nothing left of them but a bucket of meat. You'd have to scrape them off the ground with a spoon." When I sat down to write this, it was the first time I thought, "Is this something I should say?" I had been raised on great Russian literature, I thought you could go very very far, and so I wrote about that meat. But the Zone—it's a separate world, a world within the rest of the world—and it's more powerful than anything literature has to say."

"My teacher, Ales Adamovich, whose name I mention today with gratitude, felt that writing prose about the nightmares of the 20th century was sacrilege. Nothing may be invented. You must give the truth as it is. A "super-literature" is required. The witness must speak. Nietzsche's words come to mind – no artist can live up to reality. He can't lift it. It always troubled me that the truth doesn't fit into one heart, into one mind, that truth is somehow splintered. There's a lot of it, it is varied, and it is strewn about the world."

"Suffering is our capital, our natural resource. Not oil or gas – but suffering. It is the only thing we are able to produce consistently. I'm always looking for the answer: why doesn't our suffering convert into freedom? Is it truly all in vain? Chaadayev was right: Russia is a country without memory, it's a space of total amnesia, a virgin consciousness for criticism and reflection."

"I drove to a hospital for Afghan civilians with a group of nurses – we brought presents for the children. Toys, candy, cookies. I had about five teddy bears. We arrived at the hospital, a long barracks. No one has more than a blanket for bedding. A young Afghan woman approached me, holding a child in her arms. She wanted to say something – over the last ten years almost everyone here has learned to speak a little Russian – and I handed the child a toy, which he took with his teeth. "Why his teeth?" I asked in surprise. She pulled the blanket off his tiny body – the little boy was missing both arms. "It was when your Russians bombed." Someone held me up as I began to fall."

"I will take the liberty of saying that we missed the chance we had in the 1990s. The question was posed: what kind of country should we have? A strong country, or a worthy one where people can live decently? We chose the former – a strong country. Once again we are living in an era of power. Russians are fighting Ukrainians. Their brothers. My father is Belarusian, my mother, Ukrainian. That's the way it is for many people. Russian planes are bombing Syria ... A time full of hope has been replaced by a time of fear. The era has turned around and headed back in time. The time we live in now is second-hand ... Sometimes I am not sure that I've finished writing the history of the "Red" man."

"There was a time... when no political idea of the 20th century was comparable to communism (or the October Revolution as its symbol), a time when nothing attracted Western intellectuals and people all around the world more powerfully or emotionally. Raymond Aron called the Russian Revolution the “opium of intellectuals.” But the idea of communism is at least two thousand years old. We can find it in Plato’s teachings about an ideal, correct state; in Aristophanes’ dreams about a time when “everything will belong to everyone.” … In Thomas More and Tommaso Campanella … Later in Saint-Simon, Fourier and Robert Owen. There is something in the Russian spirit that compels it to try to turn these dreams into reality."

"Twenty years ago, we bid farewell to the “Red Empire” of the Soviets with curses and tears. We can now look at that past more calmly, as an historical experiment. This is important, because arguments about socialism have not died down. A new generation has grown up with a different picture of the world, but many young people are reading Marx and Lenin again. In Russian towns there are new museums dedicated to Stalin, and new monuments have been erected to him. The “Red Empire” is gone, but the “Red Man,” homo sovieticus, remains. He endures."

"I'd love to see the whole of your sex swimming in a sea of blood. The way I feel I could drink out of your skull. I could eat your heart roasted whole! You think I'm weak! My father will come home - find his money stolen! He'll send for the sheriff - and I'll tell him everything. Then there'll be peace and quiet ... forever."

"Kierkegaard is not regarded as a philosopher, nor are Feuerbach and his pupil Nietzsche, but they are extraordinarily instructive. All who construct an empty system with facts are fools. Such is Bostrom, who tries to subtilise conceptions, analyse ideas, and classify and arrange God, man, and human life under heads."

"'I think of Ramu. The Ramu I know and the Ramu I'm writing about have become indistinguishable. The same's true of the Bombay I'm recounting from experience and the Bombay I'm assembling through words. This is often how novels begin for me. There's a convergence. I live. Then something prompts me to write. The writing is not about life. It is a form of living. The two happen simultaneously."

"It's a well-known fact that no novel is taken seriously in India until a good deal of research has gone into it. This stay in the Taj will be my research. Going down the stairs will be research. So will looking out at the sea."

"There must be other leaps in life - as momentous as the "mirror stage" - that Lacan didn't mention. Some are universal; others, culturally particular. To understand that your parents are human (and not an element of the natural world), that they're separate from you, that they were children once, that they were born and came into the world, is another leap. It's as if you hadn't seen who they were earlier - just as, before you were ten months old, you didn't know it was you in the mirror. This happens when you're sixteen or seventeen. Not long after - maybe a year - you find out your parents will die. It's not as if you haven't encountered death already. But, before now, your precocious mind can't accommodate your parents' death except as an academic nicety - to be dismissed gently as too literary and sentimental. After that day, your parents' dying suddenly becomes simple. It grows clear that you're alone and always have been, though certain convergences start to look miraculous - for instance, between your father, mother, and yourself. Though your parents don't die immediately - what you've had is a realisation, not a premonition - you'll carry around this knowledge for their remaining decades or years. You won't think, looking at them, "You're going to die". It'll be an unspoken fact of existence. Nothing about them will surprise you anymore."

"I lie back. They've "refurbished" the room. I loathe the word, its blunt sound (as if someone with a cold were trying to say "furnished"), and don't say it without irony."

"The eye covers distances in a second. It lusts for freedom. Looking out, I often wanted to be free - not of home, but of the city. The eye (if it's gazing upon something it's unhappy with, as I was) might see nothing. Looking up is different. I have the freedom I then wanted."

"Frame after aluminium frame had replaced the casements. The gesture by which you push a window open was now unnecessary. ... It was as if a part of us that was air and breeze had been denied entry."

"I ... take a selfie with him; two, to be safe. My lips are parted, as if I'm poking a dead thing to see if it'll come to life; it's the phone I'm attempting to keep at a distance. He's smiling faintly, as if amuse by some exotic piece of wildlife."

"I'm undecided about the time we live in. This ongoing passage to oblivion. The disappearance of things you took for granted. Then there's the renaissance of things you never knew of, or presumed you'd never see again."

"Only drunks stare at statues .... I never liked the statues keeping vigil, primarily because they were too close to life."

"Mahadev Govind Ranade. Leaving aside his air of self-importance, he looks marginally foreign, as all statues do."

"This is what's beautiful about staying in a club or hotel: you're invisible, as is your neighbour."

"He has a traditional shopper's DNA, an eye for freshness and appearance, and a consistent sense of a home to go back to."

"History is always lying before you, unnoticed: till you suddenly see it, as we do now."

"I love churches in Bombay...they make me think of shadow. Of footfall on stone. In England, churches preside over their habitat till they're gratuitous."

"Each view has a history. You sense you're where others have been."

"At the conclusion of Hollywood disaster movies and epics, time moves backward, piecing together like a jigsaw the elements that had come apart. The Titanic resumes its journey; Russell Crowe is reunited with his murdered wife and son. It's not a happy ending; it's a convention created for the purposes of an impossible sense of uplift at the end of death and tragedy: the happy beginning. Technology makes Hades unnecessary."

"Some books I buy for their title, others for brevity. I love short books - the way you know from the first page that it's going to end."

"I treat vegetarianism as a phase that might any second end without warning."

"... "shagging" - a quasi-comical activity, like belching or farting, except it was more taboo and more necessary than these."

"Photographers are the new Brahmins: we have no volition when they rule us."

"An hour's a symbolic duration."

"Fantasists aren't natural readers. They grow restive easily."

"The dull pulse-like beat started at eleven o’clock at night. It was a new kind of music called ‘rap’. It baffled Ananda even more than disco. He had puzzled and puzzled over why people would want to listen and even move their bodies to an angry, insistent onrush of words – words that rhymed, apparently, but had no echo or afterlife. It was as if they were an extension of the body: never had words sounded so alarmingly physical, and pure physicality lacks empathy, it’s machine-like."

"History was what had happened; class was something you read about in a book."

"Class was what formed you, but didn’t travel to other cultures – it became invisible abroad. In foreign places, you were singled out by religion and race, but not class, which was more indecipherable than any other mother tongue. He’d learnt that not only were light, language, and weather contingent – class was too."

"The Roman Catholic portrait at the reception of the Indian YMCA displayed the generic Christ, the timorous, blonde-haired, blue-eyed face upturned to the heavens, a lost middle-class student searching for guidance in an inhospitable world."

"‘Calcutta has still not recovered from history: people mourn the past, and abhor it deeply.’"

"‘Afternoon’s the most dreamless and introspective time of day, a sort of midnight of the daytime ...’"

"‘... I sensed that Park Street is, essentially (even for the destitute), a place of brief acquaintances and meetings no one has too much time for anyone else, you yourself are part of a web of motivations that are fading and resurrecting – and you must be on the move constantly to be in the street’s ebb and flow of traffic.’"

"‘This is a little parable about cities and genres; how, while some of them lose their imaginative centrality, others take their place.’"

"‘Its (the Left’s) intensity derives from the fact that it’s a family largely composed of, in a manner of speaking, orphans of bhadralok history (for we hardly hear of the mothers and fathers of party members), brought together not by accident but by idealism and its cousin, ideology. Bonds of orphanhood and kinship are particularly charged (as Kipling showed us in The Jungle Book) when they are self-created, and each party member is probably a bit of everything – mother, father, sibling, friend – to every other member.’"

"‘All foreign food is doomed to be consumed in India not so much by Indians as by a voracious Indian sensibility, which demands infinite versions of Indian food, and is unmoved by difference.’"

"‘Shaped by student life in England, my wife and I are aghast at this frenetic sociability before the new weeks begins, this almost philistine uncaringness for the idea of Monday morning.’"

"(Tagore is) 'making a statement of fact, just as the remembered lines from a child’s primer (jal pare/pata nare’; rain falls/the leaf trembles) that first drew Tagore to poetry state a fact. Here, Tagore seems to be telling us that no afflatus or elaboration is necessary, because the world is at its most compelling as it is.’"

"‘The intention (of the puja pandals) is not so much to entertain as to disorient and astonish; to tap into the Bengali’s appetite for the bizarre, the uncanny.’"

"‘The myth of the Pujas is a simple one – full of rural sweetness. ... The Pujas are, in part, an ever-returning homage to that magical sense of being rescued, so indispensable to children.’"

"‘... the Bengali was the Marwari of the early nineteenth century.’"

"‘Writers don’t so much write about their own lives as create them, Barthes said; it’s an oddly modern idea. Bengalis, similarly, had to make their own history. They did it in houses, tenements, and in neighbourhoods connected by stifling alleys that are no wider than a small room ... And this is why I feel, even now, that the most revealing places in Calcutta are not the museums or the great monuments ... but the houses and lanes in which people live.’"

"‘... the world’s cheapest small car, Tata’s Nano, worth only $1500. This toy-like ill-fated vehicle, whose destiny it was to look as if it had been prematurely brought into the world, more foetus than car, and whose birth was near abortive and then indefinitely delayed, this car, when it finally took to the road, turned out to have an engine that at times exploded mysteriously. Until 2009, it was seen to be Bengal’s quirky but irreplaceable mascot for development.’"

"Tagore claims that the first time he experienced the thrill of poetry was when he encountered the children’s rhyme ‘Jal pare/pata nare’ (‘Rain falls / The leaf trembles') in Iswarchandra Vidyasagar’s Bengali primer Barna Parichay (Introducing the Alphabet). There are at least two revealing things about this citation. The first is that, as Bengali scholars have remarked, Tagore’s memory, and predilection, lead him to misquote and rewrite the lines. The actual rhyme is in sadhu bhasha, or ‘high’ Bengali: ‘Jal paritechhe / pata naritechhe’ (‘Rain falleth / the leaf trembleth’). This is precisely the sort of diction that Tagore chose for the English Gitanjali, which, with its thees and thous, has so tried our patience. Yet, as a Bengali poet, Tagore’s instinct was to simplify, and to draw language closer to speech. The other reason the lines of the rhyme are noteworthy, especially with regard to Tagore, is – despite their deceptively logical progression – their non-consecutive character. ‘Rain falls’ and ‘the leaf trembles’ are two independent, stand-alone observations: they don’t necessarily have to follow each other. It’s a feature of poetry commented upon by William Empson in Some Versions of Pastoral: that it’s a genre that can get away with seamlessly joining two lines which are linked, otherwise, tenuously."

"‘The car horns created an anxious music, discordant but not indifferent.’"

"‘And his talent became a problematic responsibility he did not know what to do with; it was as if, having given so much to his gift – hard work, practice – he wanted something in return; and not having got that “something”, whatever it might be, he had decided to punish both himself and everyone around him.’"

"‘Motilalji began to hum with a sour expression on his face, as if he was never on holiday from his talent and vocation, and resented the fact ...’"

"‘... he sang with his eyes squeezed tight, as if he were dropping from a great height.’"

"‘... a severe woman with a patient but unprevaricating gaze, who turned out to be Indira Gandhi.’"

"‘Gulp by gulp, in the air-conditioned study, he swallowed civilisation.’"

"‘Internationalism’ is a way of reading, and not a demography of readership ...’"

"‘By the second half of the nineteenth century, the importance of light and space as both metaphors or, and habitations for, the human self, or “the substance called the mind”, is absolute, especially with Tagore, who, in a letter in 1894 to his niece, would demand, not political freedom ... but “more light, more space”.’"

"‘The detective embodies, even more than the romantic drifter, rationality; this intriguing and apparent dichotomy pertains to a significant part of Bengali children’s literature as well – that ofen, especially in the proliferation of adventure, spy and mystery genres in Bengali in the first half of the twentieth century, children’s literature is not so much an escape from the humanist logos of ‘high’ literary practice, but a coming to its irreducible possibilities from a different direction.’"

"‘... the history of the “secular” as a cultural, humane, interstitial space in the midst of logos itself, has lost out to the idea of the “secular” as a fundamental manifestation of the rationality of the nation-state, just as the histories of modernity and cosmopolitanism in India have been subsumed, in our time, and for a variety of reasons, by a history of the nation.’"

"‘where the noon is a charged battery, and evening’s a visionary gloom’ ( St Cyril Road, Bombay )"

"‘I drifted past heliotropic rubbish-heaps, elderly/white houses.’ ( The Bandra Medical Store )"

"‘Never to have lived is best. And the second best/is to grow old with the morning into/afternoon, and then to evening, when sundry shadows and gestures marry/like the vanished divisions of a shut fan.’ ( St Cyril Road Sequence )"

"‘Light shafted obliquely on it.’ ( The Steamer )"

"‘To the far left, above your shoulder’s gentle/curve, like golden pods, the sodium vapour/lights in the naval dockyard ... And before us,/a continuous, unreal flare of fire defined/the horizon’s extremity, a stain on a brow.’ ( The Steamer )"

"‘As the sun came up, we/saw the leaves peer out, shivering.’ ( Letter from the Hills )"

"‘a speck of dust hanging/in a vertical wall of light.’ ( Letter from the Hills )"

"‘And the old homelovingness/of light falling and touching the black/utensils ...’ ( Kitchen )"

"In the oldest, bunched houses with tottering stairs,"

"These small freshwater fish"

"‘... what I’ve tried to allow is for the essay to be a space in which the consciousness which reads poetry or remembers a line of poetry or listens to music or goes for a walk, is also the consciousness that is inflected and threatened and endangered by the political; is also the consciousness that registers and is permeated by the political. That somehow it is not a separate ... consciousness that is hiding behind the facade of the man who remembers a line of poetry or forgets it, but that it is the same consciousness in which these various things are coming in and going out.’"

"‘I’m uncomfortable beginning at the beginning. It’s not because I’m clever, but because it’s a difficult thing, writing.’"

"‘This second time round, she’d discovered that to be happy was not so much a self-sufficient, spontaneous emotion, such as you might feel in relation to a dream or a secret, but a way of reacting to the rest of the world; that to be happy this time, she must curb the natural human instinct to look up at the sky, with its all-encompassing definition, and gaze towards the immediate ground and horizon, with its lack of shape, or abode, or clear ending.’"

"‘... the menu’s a delirious poem/on which the names of Moghlai and Punjabi and Parsi/"

"It never became so dark in the room in Claremont; some light, inquisitive and worldly, always entered through the curtains"

"‘This morning he’d discovered the bathroom light on, its lustre wasted in daylight.’"

"There was a difference between his parents with regard to appliances; his father distrusted them as he would a rival; his mother had no confidence in using them, but none the less desired them."

"... the cleverest way of battling the heat was not moving."

"There was a gulmohar tree in the lane, the flaming orange flowers erupting from within, and banyan trees, private and removed as ancient pilgrims."

"The city was still .... Soon the machinery would start working again, not out of any sense of purpose, but like a watch that is wound daily by someone’s hand. Almost without any choice in the matter, people would embark upon the minute frustrations and satisfactions of their daily lives. It was in this moment of postponement that the azaan was heard, neither announcing the day nor keeping it a secret."

"There was a special purpose in these throws, for the readers of Ganashakti were fellow-travellers of the Communist party, they believed in its necessity and vision, and an inexplicable bond was formed between the distributor, whose every aim with the bundle seemed to be a salute, and the silent house."

"Tinkling sounds came from outside, of hammering and chiselling, as labourers worked like bees, and seven- or eight-storeyed buildings rose in the place of ancestral mansions that had been razed cruelly to the ground, climbing up like ladders through screens of dust. An old mansion opposite the veranda had been repainted white, to its last banister and pillar, so that it looked like a set of new teeth. ... In another sphere altogether, birds took off from a tree or parapet, or the roof of some rich Marwari’s house, startling and speckling the neutral sky. Not a moment was still or like another moment. In a window in a servants’ outhouse attached to a mansion – both the master’s house and the servants’ lost in a bond now anachronistic and buried – a light shone even at this time of the day, beacon of winter."

"When afternoon came to Vidyasagar Road, wet clothes ... hung from a clothesline which stretched from one side to another on the veranda of the first floor. The line, which had not been tightly drawn anyway, sagged with the pressure of the heavy wet clothes that dripped, from sleeves and trouser-ends, a curious grey water on to the floor, and, especially in the middle, one noticed the line curved downwards, as if a smile were forming."

"Water begins to boil in the kettle; it starts as a private, secluded sound, pure as rain, and grows to a steady, solipsistic bubbling."

"... my mother will settle on the rug and unclip the bellows, pulling and pushing them with a mild aquatic motion with her left hand, the fingers of the right hand flowering upon the keys, the wedding-bangle suspended around her wrist. Each time the bellows are pushed, the round holes on the back open and close like eyes. Without the body music is not possible; it provides the hollow space for resonance as does the curved wooden box of the violin or the round urn of the sitar. At the moment of singing, breath tips in the swelling diaphragm as water does in a pitcher. The voice-box itself is a microscopic harp, its cords tautening and relaxing with each inflection."

"The armchairs, with their flat, sedentary cushions, were designed for society, but the bed was made for solitude. It had a straitened and measured narrowness, an austere frame made to contain the curves of a single body, to circumscribe it, carry it, give it a place, and when I slept at night, I possessed it entirely."

"At the base of her ankle is a deep, ugly scar she got when a car ran over her foot when she was six years old. That was in a small town in Bangladesh. Thus, even today, she hesitates superstitiously before crossing the road, and is painfully shy of walking distances. Her fears make her laughable. The scar is printed on her skin like a radiant star."

"While reading the Times of India each morning, my father spares a minute for the cartoon by R. K. Laxman. While my mother is, like a magician, making untidy sheets disappear in the bedroom and producing fresh towels in the bathroom, or braving bad weather in the kitchen, my father, in the extraordinary Chinese calm of the drawing-room, is dmiring the cartoon by R. K. Laxman, and, if my mother happens to be there, unselfishly sharing it with her. She, as expected, misunderstands it completely, laughing not at the joke but at the expressions on the faces of the caricatures, and at the hilarious fact that they talk to each other like human beings."

"Years ago, my mother and I fell in love with Busybee’s voice, its calm, even tone, and a smile which was always audible in the language. My father, meanwhile, is clipping his nails fastidiously, letting them fall on to an old, spread-out copy of the Times of India, till he sneezes explosively, as he customarily does, sending the crescent-shaped nail-clippings flying into the universe."

"Her hair is troublesome and curly ... It falls in long, black strands, but each strand has a gentle, complicated undulation travelling through it, like a mild electric shock or a thrill, hat gives it a life of its own; it is visually analogous to a tremolo on a musical note."

"Calcutta is like a work of modern art that neither makes sense nor has utility, but exists for some esoteric aesthetic reason."

"Trenches and mounds of dust everywhere give the city a strange bombed-out look."

"The grown-ups snapped the chillies (each made a sound terse as a satirical retort), and scattered the tiny, deadly seeds in their food."

"On the big bed, Mamima and Sandeep’s mother began to dream, sprawled in vivid crab-like postures. His aunt lay on her stomach, her arms bent as if she were swimming to the edge of a lake; his mother lay on her back, her feet (one of which had a scar on it) arranged in the joyous pose of a dancer."

"Abhi, Babla and Sandeep slept like primeval creatures huddled on the island of the bed, close to the horizon, outwaiting the dawn that would bring the first thought to their heads. Their bodies slept with a pure detached love for every moment of sleep."

"The gutters in the lane overflowed with an odd, languid grace. Water filled the lane; rose from ankle-deep to knee-deep. Insects swam in circles. Urchins splashed about haphazardly, while Saraswati returned from market with a shopping-bag in her hands; insects swam away to avoid this clumsy giant. Her wet footprints printing the floor of the house were as rich with possibility as the first footprint Crusoe found on his island."

"She would sweep the floor – unending expanses, acres and acres of floor – with a short broom called the jhadu, swiping away the dust in an arc with its long tail, which reminded one of the drooping tail of some nameless, exotic bird."

"It seemed there was no democracy among children – always an aristocracy based on strength, intellect and seniority. But seniority counted most, because a boy of ten is bound to be stronger and cleverer than a boy of nine, having spent an extra year in the world, at a time when each year is like a precious deposit in a newly opened bank account. Among boys of the same age, there would be a silent tussle, a clean, honourable contest. Once a leader emerged, however, no elections were held."

"... the floor was a stone slab of coolness, an expanse of warm ice that would not melt."

"There has been writing for 10 days now"

"‘... this refined language of Indian modernity – an Indian language that was actually first used as a first language by a home-grown cosmopolitan elite – enough to say, with or without humour, ‘Ami tomake bhalobashi’ (‘I love you’) or ‘Apni kothai thhaken?’ (‘Where do you live?). These stray statements performed an incantatory ‘open sesame’ – into the bounded, charmed, small-scale world of ‘Bengaliness’. The ‘honorary’ Bengali might be myopic; might be an aficionado of art-house cinema; might be politically left wing; might have taste for lyric poetry; a tendency towards the autobiographical; an appetite for fish; or display none of these traits.’"

"‘Calcutta, for me, was a particular idea of the modern city, and I found it in many forms, works, and genres. ... by ‘modernity’ I have in mind something that was never new. True modernity was born with the aura of inherited decay and life. ... if you look at paintings and photographs, and see old films of the city, you notice that these walls and buildings were never new – that Calcutta was born to look more or less as I saw it as a child. I’m not referring here to an air of timelessness; the patina that gave to Calcutta’s alleys, doorways, and houses their continuity and disposition is very different from the eternity that defines mausoleums and monuments. It’s this quality I’m trying to get at when I speak of modernity. ... modernity in the nineteenth century is indistinguishable from nature; perhaps it is nature – in some ways, the culvert, which has emerged from the rock, seems more of its place than the mountain itself.’"

"‘... invisibility was one of Bengali modernity’s prerequisites and cardinal achievements.’"

"…There are many ways of defining the modern but one is to say that an urban space, a man-made space, has some of the energy, wildness, unpredictability and randomness that we usually associate with nature. In another age, somebody might speak with the same kind of excitement about nature as the modernist does about the city…"

"People are much more aware of one another in England, super-aware. They are focused on others in a seemingly detached and abstract way. This was very different from India. In India you could do anything and people would see you but not see you, hear you but not hear you."

"It does like writers, but it's also Calcutta now, not the Calcutta of 25 or 30 or 100 years ago. They maybe haven't got over the idea of it, but the reality, the context that produced that, has disappeared."

"It's a very strange middle class…Full of operators and people on the move. It really doesn't value disruptions in that activeness. It doesn't have time for any privileging of daydreaming."

"Some Muslims now use the term Islamophobia instead of simply talking about racism against the Arabs. It is a very convenient, but quite wrong, way to believe that there is a specific stigma of Islam ... To fight the fight against fanaticism and to free Muslims, it would be necessary to first, that the media cease to serve as a support and platform for radicals and stop relaying these false accusations of Islamophobia."

"The building of a Palestinian state will only be possible if the mentality of the people evolves and accepts the idea of complementarity between the two states ... A brewing between the two societies is essential in order to help the Palestinians to catch up in the matter modernity compared to their Israeli neighbors."

"Those who are called revolutionaries and rebels, that is to say those who have escaped this conditioning, driven by the will to live, to reflect, to understand each other and to explore life and its."

"It is a cry of alarm that I run to save the innocence of children, threatened by madness and anger. And it is at school and at the mosque that they are formatted to become criminals! Because in my country and beyond, the main suppliers of terrorists are mosques."

"In the West, the Muslims exploit Islam for political reasons. Current issues, relating inter alia to scarf, veil and burqa attest. Nothing in the Qur'an requires the wearing of these scarves, but Muslims use it to prove their existence and to impose a common identity and recognizable to the entire community. This demand for clothing also allows extremist organizations to fight the liberalism of atheists and progressive movements. By imposing the veil, they want to distinguish Muslim women from European women, impious by definition, and prove that all the identity of these women resides in Islam, that their identity is Islam. It is obviously nonsense: the being is not defined by his religion. The scarf thus becomes a symbol through which they aspire to impose Islam in the countries that host them by demanding from them rights, on their terms. But Western laxity is problematic. The West, which has millions of Muslims from elsewhere and grants them citizenship, tolerates that some of them live in ghettos and demand respect for their own rules, even before integrating and respecting the laws. from their host country. The example of the Muslims in Britain is flagrant. They want to fight the ungodly, enforce the rules of Ramadan, prohibit the sale and consumption of alcohol, forbid indigenous Christians to eat in public during the month of fasting, establish sharia law and declare jihad in Hyde Park!"

"Then one day, I took my courage in both hands. I first expanded my reading and immersed myself in philosophical and scientific works that called for reflection on the existence of God, such as To End God with the British Richard Dawkins. This book brought me the answers that religion was unable to provide me. Through the work of Darwin, Hawking, and other scientists who have marked humanity, I have discovered that most scholars are atheists. I had come to understand why the work of these scholars was not taught in our schools and universities: simply because those of Dawkins or for example, the theory of evolution of Darwin, go against the primacy of religion on science. ... / ... The Internet has allowed me to discover that the famous miracles of Islam, claimed by the religious and willingly relayed by the press and Islamic satellite television, were just lies. ... / ... Darwin's theory of evolution seemed to me much more convincing than the legend of Adam and Eve."

"To dominate the faithful, the religious found an effective treatment: the administration of five daily bites, at fixed times announced by the Muezzin. As soon as his calls sound, people rush to the mosque and prostrate themselves by banging their heads on the ground, thus kissing their submission. Before the effects of the sting disappear, they undergo an injection of words that paralyze their brain fog of religion ... / ... Anesthetized, the faithful lives in the illusion and leaves the responsibility of its existence to the masters who say to speak in the name of God and to represent it on Earth ... / ... The religious have made generations of helpless to sacralized ignorance, deprived of future, progress, humanism, dignity and freedom."

"Too many Muslims still refuse to integrate in the West today. They claim all the rights granted to Western citizens in the name of human rights and equality, but they refuse the duties incumbent upon these citizens. They want to impose their religion to states that no longer have a religion and to the societies that practice it discreetly. In France, many of them do not respect the state and do not give it any importance ... / ... France and the West must protect their precious secularism, especially since it seems impossible in the Arab countries."

"This desire to impose coexistence and cohabitation in the name of "living together", while these guests of the nation do not intend to respect this concept, is to let termites destroy a house by saying that it is necessary that these poor beasts feed. (p. 41)"

"There is no difference between the radicals who kill in the name of Allah and the pretended moderates who applaud and find them extenuating circumstances. The mistake in France is that the media use the term "extremist" to refer to jihadists who massacre and terrorize civilians and call "moderate" all others. Yet those who believe in sharia and dream of applying it, who reject gender equality, who impose Islam and its symbols in everyday life, who demand the separation of men and women in the public space who introduce religion to school through halal meat, who demand the veil, who want to adapt society to their ideology, who applaud the execution of renegades and want to Islamize through preaching are all extremists, even they have not - or not yet - carried the weapons. In fact, all Muslims who meet these criteria must be considered radicals. (p. 151)"

"Like all exclusive ideologies, such as Marxism or eugenics, Islam wants to be the sole holder of the truth and the embodiment of its salvation. His hegemony, dogmatism and tyranny make Islam an eradicating movement. Those among non-Muslims who strive to seek a moderate Islam demonstrate their ignorance of the very nature of this religion. Muslims who defend an allegedly temperate Islam also ignore the foundations of their faith or are duplicitous and hypocritical. They hide their bloodthirsty history to present it in a better light. As a result, we can not speak of moderate Muslims. (pp. 154-155)"

"Jihad and terrorism carry the same meaning despite the efforts of Muslims to dissociate and differentiate them. Terrorism is not a new phenomenon in Islam, since it has been the main tool for the expansion of Islamic State since Muhammad. Islamic conquests were indeed a form of terrorism, although consistent with the practices of the time. [...] terrorism, the hereditary fruit of Koranic education, has its roots in the East. He is the son of the cohesion policy created by the Prophet Muhammad and his followers, bringing together all pre-Islamic groups under the same ideology: Islam. (pp. 209-210)"

"If Western countries really fear Islam, why do they welcome so many Muslims, granting them asylum and many helpers? Why do they tolerate the construction of so many mosques on their soil while Muslim countries forbid the building of churches on their own? If there is a real hostility towards Islam, why are hundreds of thousands of Muslims trying to clandestinely reach the lands of the infidels and apostates, often risking their lives? [...] the West is innocent of accusations of Islamophobia against it, [...] political Islam has invented this term to accelerate the ghettoisation of Muslims, oppose them to the host countries and radicalize them. (pp. 126-127)"

"Hatred against Islam becomes the second terminology used after Islamophobia to escape the debate. It is particularly aimed at lay people of Muslim or Arab origin. Practitioners are abusing it against ex-Muslims who dare to denounce virulent preaching and calls for violence in mosques and relayed to their neighborhoods. But where is the hatred to denounce hatred? (p. 135)"

"Accepting the hijab in advertisements, in children's toys or even considering the fact that children wear the veil at school or on television as something "normal" is not evidence of cultural diversity and openness of European societies but this is a proof of the gentle Islamization of these societies."

"I want to make things clear about the hijab. Anyone who is for equality between the sexes is against this garment which designates the woman as a temptress who must cover herself to keep her modesty! The hijab has an inherent sexual dimension. Before Islam, this practice of disguising women of the public dimension already existed, to show their inferiority. Now, the hijab is instrumentalized by Islamists who have understood its political dimension, in opposition to the values of emancipation and the Republic."

"A question for those who mix racism and freedom with the veil debate: who is the racist? he who defends the values of equality, of modernity, as well as the values of the French revolution or the one that advocates a return to medieval values and a dark period in which no equality existed?"

"When we begin to close our eyes on veiled girls in the name of "modesty" ... we finally close our eyes to girls raped under the guise of "marriage"."

"The veil is nothing but a sign of political Islam, as the armbands were for the Nazis!"

"I am against the veil not only because it is a religious sign, but because it is a symbol of the enslavement of women and sexism! Do not let yourself be convinced that the wearing of the veil is an act of freedom because it is the imprisonment of women in communitarianism and it is also their residence and cultural identity. In Europe today the veil is the symbol of conquering political Islam and a sign of visible and communicative Islamization."

"She sat quietly in one corner of the sofa, the end of her sari drawn modestly over her hair. Like the motionless illusion of a madly spinning top, she was staring vacantly into space."

"How as a young girl, Ismat Chugtai convinced her father to excuse her from learning how to cook, and give her instead the opportunity to go to school and get an education: “Women cook food Ismat. When you go to your in-laws what will you feed them?” he asked gently after the crisis was explained to him. “If my husband is poor, then we will make khichdi and eat it and if he is rich, we will hire a cook,” I answered. My father realised his daughter was a terror and that there wasn’t a thing he could do about it."

"What use the green river, the gold place, if time and death pinned human in the pocket of my land not rest from taking underground the green all-willowed and white rose and bean flower and morning-mist picnic of song in pepper-pot breast of thrush?"

"From the first place of liquid darkness, within the second place of air and light, I set down the following record with its mixture of fact and truths and memories of truths and its direction always toward the Third Place, where the starting point is myth."

"The word permanent... had its own kind of revenge on those who misused it, for the Bible said that nothing was permanent and everything came and went."

"Either you are in favor of human dignity and respect fir human rights, or you are against human rights. There is no their possibility."

"People learn from experience. We have learned that in order to be revolutionaries and advance a revolutionary process, it is necessary to have one's feet on the ground."

"...When we talk about the FSLN, we are not talking about something that is just a political party. We're not talking simply about an armed organization. We are talking about a historic response. We are talking about the indivisible reality of the FSLN and the Nicaraguan people. As long as this people is militant and proud, as long as this people is made up of heroic workers, as long as the workers and peasants and all revolutionaries are ready to defend the national sovereignty arms in hand, as long as there are Nicaraguans who love the land where they were born, as long as this people exists, the FSLN will continue to exist."

"The sons and daughters of this country are not robots, not mannequins. This is a population every day more conscious, more audacious, and more creative. With this heroic population, we will make it to our goal, we will for all the way. With this heroic population that understands the world around it more clearly every day, it will be easier to come up with the right answers to the questions the revolution poses."

"We hate war, and our National Directorate has repeated this many times. We haven't organized the defense of our revolution for the purpose of conquering neighboring territories - or distant ones for that matter. We have done it in order to win peace. Our friends and neighbors can rest assured that this revolution was made in order to defend the land of our birth."

"Our revolution has always been internationalist, ever since Sandino fought in the Segovias. There were internationalists from all over the world who fought alongside Sandino, men from Venezuela, Mexico, Peru. Another who fought alongside Sandino was the great hero of the Salvadoran people named Farabundo Marti. It is not strange that we are internationalists, because this is something we got from Sandino. All the revolutionaries and all the peoples of Latin America especially know that our people's heart is with them, beats alongside theirs. Our heart goes out to Latin America, and we also know that Latin America's heart goes our to the Nicaraguan revolution."

"We are creating a new society in which an individual is not a piece of merchandise, a society in which there are no wolves and lambs, when men do not live off the exploitation of other men. We are struggling to create a society in which the workers are the fundamental power driving things forward, but in which other social sectors also play a role, always insofar as they identify with the interests of the country, with the interests of the great majority"

"When a scientific principle puts on the toga of social dignity, it turns itself into a bell or a parrot; such phantoms have always been the most dangerous enemies of reason."

"Between the Protestant North and the Counter-Reformation of Vienna, menaced by Venetian intrigue, under the Ottomans and under the bloody tyranny of their own native nobles, split into three churches and five states, the Croatian masses vegetated in passive resistance for centuries, invisibly resilient in their Proto-Slavic passivity, which had survived the lordships of Rome and Byzantium and already (in principle) was getting over Istanbul. (...)Born in the Schism between Rome and the Slavs, torn by the fatal dilemma of the East and West, Križanić is a typical victim of our geographic position. As the instigator of Russian imperialism on a conceptual level equalling Peter the Great, as a forerunner and prophet of Panslavism, of Slavophiles, as the linguist of a Cyrillic/Latin synthesis to be followed by Romantic Illyrians, Soloviev, Rački, Strossmayer, and all the way to our "realistic" contemporary Yugoslavian political movement (1898-1928), as a theoretical colonizer of the remote Slavic East, historian of Siberia and dreamer of China, as a desperate man with Biblical lamentations over the schism, this half-mad missionary was abused for years, later suffered as an interned monk and beggar, and eventually died under Turkish hooves. (...)Around Juraj Križanić, armies were marching under generals Isolani and Wallenstein, cannons were firing around Prague, Magdeburg and Lutzen. People were skinned alive, impaled on stakes, had their throats cut, drank human blood, massacred one another from Sisak to Koprivnica for a hundred years, and everywhere there was the wail of the wounded, the rattling of lepers, and the mumbling of cripples and beggars. Everything was bloody like a wound and stank like a beggar's putrid rag."

"Clerks and constables, barracks and precincts, municipalities, documents, offices: all of this was seen by our heroes [mobilized Croatian peasants] as a machine that was invented by educated city folk for the sole purpose of letting the blood of paupers and counting the peasants' bags, pigs, and mares; however, this entire machinery of educated folk and doctors of the Triune Kingdom underestimated the great and indomitable life inside them, and when our heroes thought about themselves and their life, this is what it looked like, more or less: this is my hut; it has a slanted roof so that rain flows left and right instead of falling on my head. It's a good invention, not having the rain fall on one's head, and I inherited it from my grandfather, this sooty warm roof, and I will leave it to my son, because a roof is a smart thing. (Without a roof, man would be like a beast.) I sit under this mushroom of mine and watch the smoke go up, while the waters of heaven flow and soak the fields. This is good too. My wife sits at the loom like a spider, there is a potato rolling in my pot, and there should be a couple of fat smoked ribs on the attic. That is all. Honestly, I don't need more. Life is good! The man lights his pipe in the twilight as he watches yellow cat eyes shining like fireflies in the oxen steam in the stable. Life is good! (...)These people were shot by Hungarian gendarmes, all according to the Compromise of 1868, they had their wives and daughters raped by revolutionaries in 1848 and by deserters after Custozza and Solferino; when their women gave birth, they still cut the umbilical cord themselves, with a sickle, and went to work three days later; the dead were splashed with wine just like in the old pagan times. The fact that huge empires rose and fell on the shores of the European seas, that new lands were discovered, that life fundamentally changed, all of that didn't mean a thing to this life here. Or rather it did! Churches and prisons were built in the valleys: stone buildings with flags and Roman crosses, with lightning rods and church organs, with bars and articles of law; but all those prisons and offices and churches were not there yesterday, and it may come to pass that those churches and documents and articles will not be there tomorrow either, and the villages of Saint Elizabeth and Saint John will be Foxhole and Wolf Pit like before, and we're quits! God be praised!Since they considered things and measured events with this sublime and tried measure, it is quite natural that our heroes weren't too upset about this so-called war."

"[Zagreb. The twilight of Austria-Hungary. At the celebration of a priest's First Mass, the youth discusses the problems of the state and the church. The older generation, on the other hand...]"Ask these respectable gentlemen, if you don't believe me, to explain to you that the Earth is round!", angrily said uncle Šimonić, the janitor of the observatory. He has some little authority in astronomy, after all. When great professors and astronomers go to the attic to look at the stars, they go through his kitchen! And he carries all the keys to the stars in his pocket. And this man before him, this member of the public who doesn't even know what is an eclipse, this dolt won't believe him that the Earth is round and spinning like a ball."Round! So it is round! Fine, have it your way! It is round! Well then! Is this apple round? It is? So it is round like the Earth, as you say. And this crumb here is a man! Tell me now, how come the crumb falls from the apple when I turn the apple around? Well? Look how it falls right away! Did you ever hear that a single man fell off the Earth? You haven't? Would you be so kind and explain this to me?"That's true! Uncle Šimonić never thought that a man would fall off the Earth if it was really round. And it's as simple as a slap in the face, god damn it. And when those crazy professors up in the observatory explain things to him, it all seems so clear to him. But there you have it! Crumbs fall off the apple, and Šimonić, the royal janitor of the royal observatory, could fall off the Earth by the same principle. There's something fishy here after all!"

"A Person Unknown has brought Autumn in the North Room. Oh now, when all is color, harvest, and smell of wine, when one hears the song of Things and Beasts, when the longing dead yell in their graves, A Person Unknown has brought Autumn on a silver platter in the room: grapes and pears, apples and figs.And outside there are steaming pools of sun juice, as one hears through the window: in the silk of day a woman is singing.And the birds tweet on."

"Ever more alone, ever madder, remoter, sadder alone, ever darker, ever baser, as it awfuls more and more.Ever colder, ever viler, ever icier, autumn's lonely void, as it autumns more and more."

"Twenty-four years of noble struggle against so many morbid germs that would annihilate the collective effort, that terribly and vilely devote themselves to devouring mutualism"

"twenty-four years of joining souls through the principle of humanity, through the sentiment of innate altruism in the heart, and altruism that permits us to fulfill our obligation to our beloved comrade"

"That is mutualism, a noble mission of truth, sublime and holy mission mission of charity that nations ignore or have forgotten; nations, whose workers are dispersed, segregated, strangers to each other, and . . . how many times, sad to say, more than strangers, subject to ruinous enmities, that workers’ element divides instead of seeking [union], becomes offended instead of giving aid and, no, rejects with hatred its own [members] , rather than embracing [all workers] with love; [workers] reject each other without seeing that their blood and their anguish kneaded together become the bitter bread that they devour together; without seeing that their arms are what sustain the industry of nations, their richness and their greatness."

"Mutualism needs the vigor of struggle and the firmness of conviction to advance in its unionizing effort; it needs to shake away the apathy of the masses, and enchain with links of abnegation the passions that rip apart its innermost being; it needs hearts that say: I am for you, as I want you to be for me; mutualism has need of us workers, the humble, the small gladiators of the idea, it needs for us to salvage from our egotisms something immense, something divine, that can make us a society ,that can make us nobly human. And the worker should not think of his humbleness, nr of his insignificance, he should not reason that he is unimportant and so remove himself discouraged from the social concert. What does it matter that he is but an atom, what does it matter? The atoms invisible for their smallness are the only elements of the universe."

"The worker is the arm, the heart of the world."

"it is to him, untiring and tenacious struggler, that the future of humanity belongs. May you, beloved workers, integral part of human progress, yet celebrate, uncounted anniversaries, and with your example may you show societies how to love each other so that they may be mutualists and to unite so that they may be strong."

"At the turn of the century, Sara Estela Ramírez, the Villarreal sisters, Leonor Villegas de Magnón, Jovita Idar and the staff members of La Voz de la Mujer and Pluma Roja were organic intellectuals of their times who revealed different discursive positionings of women within their societies, positionings informed by the master narratives of nationalism, religion and anarchism. Until now these women's work as publishers and their written contributions have remained virtually unrecognized. Either because of political affiliations or gender discrimination, their work has not been recognized in Mexico. In the United States, these factors, as well as linguistic biases, have relegated their work to oblivion. These women's stories and their publishing efforts, nonetheless, capture the realities of a people, the significance of whose daily existence transcends the limitations imposed by political and national borders."

"The U.S. -Mexico borderland saw mexicanas fighting for the revolution, often with the PLM, and also to win justice for tejanos. They included Sara Estela Ramírez, who lived in Laredo and became known to thousands of tejanos as a labor organizer, human rights activist and poet. She launched a revolutionary feminist newspaper, Aurora, in 1904. She died in 1910 at the age of 29 but her unique, visionary poetry rings true today."

"Tejana socialist labor leader and political activist Sara Estela Ramirez would not live to participate in El Primer Congreso Mexicanista held the following year. Ramirez's ideas, however, would resonate in the words of her compañeras. Composed of South Texas residents, this Congreso was the first civil rights assembly among Spanish-speaking people in the United States. With delegates representing community organizations and interests from both sides of the border, its platform addressed discrimination, land loss, and lynching. Women delegates, such as Jovita Idar, Soldedad Peña, and Hortensia Moncaya, spoke to the concerns of Tejanos and Mexicanos."

"The disappearance or decrease in prayer formulas of classical terms indicating the supernatural and the meaning of Christian revelation, first of all that of grace, has favored both the secularization of the rite and of Catholic mentality. Hence few today believe that the liturgical texts serve the priest to talk to God; they evoke a script of which the priest is the director or leading actor, the vogue word of "modern" liturgists."

"Zoom and other outlets deform our images, making us lose our actual bodies, and with the possibility of contacting each other this way—we become holograms, or ghosts like Justine from Bioy Casares’s great novel, The Invention of Morel."

"One of the first things that occurs in totalitarian regimes, as we saw with research, such as Hitler and Stalin et al., is the act of abhorring culture, of banning and burning books."

"In Y por mirarlo todo, nada veía, I tried to show how the meaningless proliferation of news and the almost endemic impossibility of ranking and practicing irony contaminate and disable us in our efforts to keep a healthy mental distance."

"All of us, no matter whether noble or not, have our own family trees. (Prologue)"

"Perhaps what attracts me about my Jewish past and present is an awareness of its vividness, its colour and its grotesqueness, the same awareness that makes real Jews a minor race with a major sense of humour, with their ordinary cruelty, their unfortunate tenderness and their occasional shamelessness. (Prologue)"

"my brother-in-law says I don't seem Jewish, because Jews, like our first cousins the Arabs, hate images. So everything is mine and yet it isn't, and I look Jewish and I don't and that is why I am writing this- my family history, the story of my own family tree. (Prologue)"

"Time is a space marked out and filled with the ceaseless chanting of prayers by which a devout Jew measures his life."

"It doesn't matter much whether you're a Jew or not, what matters is whether you're willing to fight against the herd instinct. (13)"

"Living with someone probably means losing part of your own identity. Living with someone contaminates (36)"

"Is the pleasure of remembering somehow debilitating? Maybe memory gets weakened by being handled and stretched so much. Memories return so often and we stay hooked onto some event or other... (37)"

"There is no such thing as a race without its own cooking. Or even without its daily bread. (43)"

"A dearth in published literature exists despite the multitude of noteworthy female authors who share the Latin American Jewish identity; writers like Angelina Muñiz, Clarice Lispector, and Margo Glantz. The long-time omission of these authors from anthologies likely reflects how they have historically been afforded less recognition and renown than their male counterparts."

"Along with a funny and enchanting memoir of her Jewish family's migration to Mexico, Margo Glantz has given us in The Family Tree an exploration of what it means to belong to two worlds and how it can enrich our own identity if both of these worlds intertwine."

"The first person to name that movement "Magical Realism," to give a label to that, was Alejo Carpentier. He was living with the surrealists in France and the surrealists were inventing this wonderful new thing of printing together on a dissecting table, a sewing machine and an umbrella, and that was surrealism. And Alejo Carpentier realized that this was an intellectual process that had its roots, and he could see the umbrella and the sewing machine on this dissecting table in Latin America because it was part of our culture. Kafka would have been a realist if he would have lived in Mexico. So Alejo Carpentier realized that, and he abandoned the surrealists and searched in our roots, in our history, in our legends, in our folklore. He was the first one to label it. And it was wonderful because it was like giving permission to other writers to finally use their own voices. Because before that our writers were always trying to imitate Europeans, or North Americans, and were denying all our Indian background, our African influence, our own languages, and legends, and myths. This was just an open door for all that. I think that was the beginning of the Boom. That really gave a lot of people permission to do anything. But it's not a literary device, it's part of our life. The magic is still there."

"Alejo Carpentier was absolutely wonderful. The Kingdom of the Earth is an exquisite little novel-it's brilliant."

"For many years I have said, following the tradition of Nicolás Guillén, Fernando Ortiz and Alejo Carpentier, that whoever wants to understand Cuba cannot ignore its mestizo condition in which the Hispanic and African components cannot be divided because they have created a cosmovisión that is authentically original."

"You ask how we are these days. What do you think is the condition of small nations? What could be the seal set upon them in present circumstances, but humiliation and more humiliation? I know very little about politics and I admit that I would be imposing if I were to tackle the history of nations and their fate. But the little I know from what I have studied tells me that sincerity between nations is scarce and that honesty in people's souls is a poetic illusion with which leaders seek to influence the minds and affections of others, in order to make them pay with their blood and their lives. Why? For economic gain. That is all! Particularly during a war, to someone with a critical eye, "freedom" seems a rhetorical wine to intoxicate the people's hearts. Freedom has beautiful and precious meaning, but everything sweet and dear is impossible. Had the people tasted real freedom even for a second, they would have been gods. Indeed divinity is absolute freedom."

"It cannot be hard for you to understand how the war has destroyed in our glowing souls beliefs we thought eternal and how it has injured whatever hopes we had, the greatest and most splendid hopes. Tell me: if we despair of progress, we who have dedicated to it all our thoughts and spiritual energy, what can we hope for? And where can we search for a base on which to build the palaces of hope?"

"I love France and England not with a political love, because I don't know anything about politics, but an esthetic one: I love their literatures, poetry, and some individuals."

"I really like subtle ideas and communication with refined people who take you beyond daily chores and small sad events."

""We should free the woman, so that her children won't grow up to become slaves. And we should remove the veil of illusions from her eyes, so that by looking into them, her husband, brother and son will discover that there is a great meaning to life." These spellbinding words are the saying of a renowned feminist, who was among the first Arab literary figures to embellish feminine intellectuality."

"A true romantic, Zeyadah's literary style is characterized by fusing emotion with fantasy and romanticism with objectivity...More than anything else, she left behind a legacy of women liberators who believed that with knowledge and art, women can finally inhale the ions of emancipation."

"the gifted writer"

"In an opening speech of one of her lectures, May Ziyadeh described poverty as 'illness, indolence and enslavement' and she continued as follows: "No society can enjoy good health when its members are ill... and no nation can enjoy independence if its citizens are enslaved. An attribute of the rich is a virtue but for the poor it is a flaw. ... Women can be a cause for poverty but can also be a cause for prosperity"...In her speech at one of her conferences, May Ziyadeh emphasized the role of women in a civilized society to stand in opposition to the traditional culture in the following statement: "We should free the woman, so that her children won't grow up to become slaves. And we should remove the veil of illusions from her eyes, so that by looking into them, her husband, brother and son will discover that there is a great meaning to life"...May Ziyadeh criticizes male-dominated society and addresses men that "if you are the material, the women are the soul, if you are the fiction, the women are the prose""

"To sum up, it can be said that not only May Ziyadeh's poetry but also her stories, plays and articles reflect the wrong attitudes of people in her society by revealing the actual history of her time. Her fictional works allow the reader to conceptualize the "woman question" in Arabic history and culture, and the poet's sufferings as a well-educated, westernized person who is trying to change the cultural norms and establish an egalitarian society without gender discrimination. Like, Þüküfe Nihal, the Turkish poetess, May Zeyadeh, the renowned poetess of Lebanese origin, because of her progressive ideas in women's rights and education and freedom, has been misunderstood by her contemporaries and nearest circle."

"Women’s education was rare, if non-existent...When she joined this literary circle, she was highly cultured, not just from what she learned at school but also from the books she read. That’s why educating women was an obsession for her, as she herself was very cultured. That was a first sign of her rebellion against ignorance and her demands to educate girls at an early age."

"Imitar equivale a moverse i fatigarse en el wagón de un ferrocarril: nos imajinamos realizar mucho i no hacemos más que seguir el impulso del motor."

"El hombre anda con pasos cortos en la infancia i en la vejez."

"la forma da el mérito; n'olvidemos que sólo por la forma, el carbono se llama unas veces carbón i otras veces diamante"

"Si las naciones d'Europa figuran como los grandes paquidermos del reino intelectual, no representemos en el Perú a los microbios de la literatura."

"Lo que poco cuesta, poco dura. Los libros que admiran i deleitan a la Humanidad, fueron pensados i escritos en largas horas de soledad i recojimiento, costaron a sus autores el hierro de la sangre i el fósforo del cerebro."

"Quien escribe hoi i desea vivir mañana, debe pertenecer al día, a la hora, al momento en que maneja la pluma. Si un autor sale de su tiempo, ha de ser par'adivinar las cosas futuras, no para desenterrar ideas i palabras muertas."

"Si hay placer en conquistar con la espada, no falta dulzura en iluminar con l'antorcha. Gloria por gloria, vale más dejar chispas de luz que regueros de sangre."

"La intelijencia no tiene por qué abdicar ante la fuerza; por el contrario, la voz del hombre razonable i culto debe ser un correctivo a la obra perniciosa de cerebros rudimentarios."

"No arguyan con obstáculos insuperables: el hombre de talento sólido, como el César de buena raza, atraviesa el Rubicón."

"La Ciencia tiene flores inmortales de donde pueden las abejas estraer miel de poesía."

"En oposición a los políticos que nos cubrieron de vergüenza y oprobio se levantan los literatos que prometen lustre y nombradía. Después de los bárbaros que hirieron con la espada vienen los hombres cultos que desean civilizar con la pluma."

"nuestro poder estriba en la unión: todos los rayos del Sol, difundidos en la superficie de la Tierra, no bastan a inflamar un solo grano de pólvora, mientras unos cuantos haces de luz solar, reunidos en un espejo ustorio, prenden la mina que hace volar al monte de granito."

"Las revoluciones vienen de arriba y se operan desde abajo. Iluminados por la luz de la superficie, los oprimidos del fondo ven la justicia y se lanzan a conquistarla, sin detenerse en los medios ni arredrarse con los resultados. Mientras los moderados y los teóricos se imaginan evoluciones geométricas o se enredan en menudencias y detalles de forma, la multitud simplifica las cuestiones, las baja de las alturas nebulosas y las confina en terreno práctico. Sigue el ejemplo de Alejandro: no desata el nudo, le corta de un sablazo."

"El hombre no disfruta de los derechos que otros le conceden por la razón, sino de los que él mismo se conquista por la fuerza. Toda libertad nació bañada en sangre, y el advenimiento de la justicia debe compararse con un alumbramiento desgarrador y tempestuoso, no con una germinación tranquila y silenciosa. No aguardamos a que de arriba nos otorguen derechos ni libertades. Del que manda, nunca vino cosa buena ni gratuita, y las naciones que se adormecen confiadas en que la Autoridad se acerque a despertarlas con el don de la independencia son como los insensatos que en el desierto edificaran una ciudad, aguardando que un río viniese a cruzarla por el medio."

"Dada la inclinación general de los hombres al abuso del poder, todo gobierno es malo y toda autoridad quiere decir tiranía"

"Para Manuel González Prada, esta emoción bravía y selecta, una de las que, con más entusiasmo, me ha aplaudido el gran maestro."