Who are we, who is each one of us if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things we have imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects,...

Today each of you is the object of the other’s reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story.

I like to know that book exists that I will still be able to read…” she says, sure that existent objects, concrete albeit unknown, must correspond to the strength of her desire. How can you...

As Raimbaut dragged a dead man along he thought, ‘Ohcorpse, I have come rushing here only to be dragged along by theheels like you. What is this frenzy that drives me, this mania forbattle and...

It’s better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books.

We’ll make an army in the trees and bring the earth and the people on it to their senses.

the cemetery is the home of those who are not here, come in.

The difference between the true and the false is only a prejudice of ours.

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

I am the man who comes and goes between the bar and the telephone booth. Or, rather:that man is called ‘I’ and you know nothing else about him, just as this station is called only...

again I am torn between the necessity and the impossibility of answering.

Reading is solitude.

I was living and dying in all the fibers of what is chewed and digested and in all the fibers that absorb the sun, consuming and digesting. Under the thatched arbor of a restaurant on...

Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.

what matters is not the enclosure of the work within a harmonious figure, but the centrifugal force produced by it — a plurality of language as a guarantee of a truth that is not merely...

The city of Leonia refashions itself every day: every morning the people wake between fresh sheets, wash with just-unwrapped cakes of soap, wear brand-new clothing, take from the latest model refrigerator still unopened tins, listening...

The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss.

In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books...

It can also be useful to politics, enabling that science to discover how much of it is no more than verbal construction, myth, literary tops. Politics, like literature, must above all know itself and distrust...

You only have to start saying of something : ‘Ah, how beautiful ! We must photograph it !’ and you are already close to the view of the person who thinks that everything that is...

Signs form a language, but not the one you think you know.

If I were to draw, I would apply myself only to studying the form of inanimate objects,” I said somewhat imperiously, because I wanted to change the subjects and also because a natural inclination does...

Nuestro padre se asomó al antepecho.- ¡Cuando te canses de estar ahí ya cambiarás de idea! – le gritó.- Nunca cambiaré de idea – dijo mi hermano desde la rama.- ¡Ya verás, en cuanto bajes!-...

The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also...

…eyes that, like those of children, look at an eternal present without forgiveness.

although science interests me just because of its efforts to escape from anthropomorphic knowledge, I am nonetheless convinced that our imagination cannot be anything but anthropomorphic.

Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.

Resta-nos esclarecer a parte que nesse golfo fantástico cabe ao imaginário indireto, ou seja, o conjunto de imagens que a cultura nos fornece, seja ela cultura de massa ou outra forma de tradição. Esta questão...

Cities also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither the one nor the other suffices to hold up their walls. You take delight not in a city’s seven or...

Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and...

Oh yes, you do, now, for you love me and you suffer.

To write, for example, a crime that is horrible but which somehow ‘resembles’ the butterfly, which would be light and fine like the butterfly. I could also describe the butterfly, but bearing in mind the...

The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and...

It was the love which the hunter has for living things, and which he can only express by aiming his gun at them …

For Leopardi, unhappy hedonist that he was, what is unknown is always more attractive than what is known; hope and imagination are the only consolations for the disappointments and sorrows of experience. Man therefore projects...

Don’t be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful to me. If a book truly...

It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty – that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a...

Bağışla beni efendimiz: er geç o rıhtıma çıkacağım kuşkusuz,” der Marco, “ama dönüp sana anlatamayacağım onu. Böyle bir kent var, ve de basit bir sırrı var: yalnız gidişleri bilir, dönüşleri bilmez.

No se asombre de verme siempre vagando con los ojos. En realidad este es mi modo de leer, y solo así la lectura me resulta fructífera. Si un libro me interesa realmente, no logro seguirlo...

They knew each other. He knew her and so himself, for in truth he had never known himself. And she knew him and so herself, for although she had always known herself she had never...

Myśli te zaprawione były pewną goryczą ludzi starych, którzy więcej cierpią nad utratą rzeczy dawnych, niż cieszą się z nadejścia nowych.

I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.

From mirror to mirror — this is what I happen to dream of — the totality of things, the whole, the entire universe, divine wisdom could concentrate their luminous rays into a single mirror. Or...

In fact the problem Leopardi is facing is speculative and metaphysical, a problem in the history of philosophy from Parmenides to Descartes and Kant: the relationship between the idea of infinity as absolute space and...

I, too, feel the need to reread the books I have already read,” a third reader says, “but at every rereading I seem to be reading a new book, for the first time. Is it...

To fall in the void as I fell: none of you knows what that means… I went down into the void, to the most absolute bottom conceivable, and once there I saw that the extreme...

La città di Leonia rifà se stessa tutti i giorni: ogni mattina la popolazione si risveglia tra lenzuola fresche, si lava con saponette appena sgusciate dall’involucro, indossa vestaglie nuove fiammanti, estrae dal più perfezionato frigorifero...

Già nella vetrina della libreria hai individuato la copertina col titolo che cercavi. Seguendo questa traccia visiva ti sei fatto largo nel negozio attraverso il fitto sbarramento di Libri Che Non Hai Letto che ti...

Then, all of a sudden, those pea-green lawns where the first scarlet poppies were flowering, those canary-yellow fields which striped the tawny hills sloping down to a sea full of azure glints, all seemed so...

I’ve been in love for five hundred million years…