Probablemente de todos nuestros sentimientos el único que no es verdaderamente nuestro es la esperanza. La esperanza le pertenece a la vida, es la vida misma defendiéndose.

The fantastic breaks the crust of appearance … something grabs us by the shoulders to throw us outside ourselves. I have always known that the big surprises await us where we have learned to be...

Y allá en el fondo está la muerte si no corremos y llegamos antes y comprendemos que ya no importa.

La falta de experiencia es inevitable, si leo a Joyce estoy sacrificando automáticamente otro libro y viceversa, etc.

Pero el amor, esa palabra…

The mysterious does not spell itself out in capital letters, as many writers believe, but is always between, an interstice.

hay que vivir combatiéndose, es la ley, la única manera que vale la pena pero duele

All established order forms a line of resistance against the threat of rupture and places its meager forces at the service of continuity. That everything should continue as usual is the bourgeois standard of a...

All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.

Happy are those who choose, those who accept being chosen, the handsome heroes, the handsome saints, the perfect escapists.

Cómo si se pudiera elegir en el amor. Cómo si no fuera un rayo que te parte los huesos y te deja estaqueado en la mitad del patio… Vos no elegís la lluvia que te...

The more a book is like an opium pipe, the more the Chinaman reader is satisfied with it and tends to discuss the quality of the drug rather than its lethargic effects.

In the twentieth century nothing can better cure the anthropocentrism that is the author of all our ills than to cast ourselves into the physics of the infinitely large (or the infinitely small).

Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.

Negarse a que el acto delicado de girar el picaporte, ese acto por el cual todo podría transformarse, se cumpla con la fría eficacia de un reflejo cotidiano.

qué otra cosa es el amor sino reincidencia

I am talking about the responsibility of the poet, who is irresponsible by definition, an anarchist enamored of a solar order and never of the new order or whatever slogan makes five or six hundred...

All I have to do is to look at you to know that with you, I am going to soak my soul

We know that attention acts as a lightning rod. Merely by concentrating on something one causes endless analogies to collect around it, even penetrate the boundaries of the subject itself: an experience that we call...

Pero el amor, esa palabra… Moralista Horacio, temeroso de pasiones sin una razón de aguas hondas, desconcertado y arisco en la ciudad donde el amor se llama con todos los nombres de todas las calles,...

The modern story begun, one might say, with Edgar Allan Poe, which proceeds inexorably, like a machine destined to accomplish its mission with the maximum economy of means.

Thirsty for being, the poet ceaselessly reaches out to reality, seeking with the indefatigable harpoon of the poem a reality that is always better hidden, more re(g)al. The poem’s power is as an instrument of...

Estábamos bien, y poco a poco empezábamos a no pensar. Se puede vivir sin pensar.

My creatures are born of a long denial,” seems to me the best definition of writing as a kind of exorcism, casting off invading creatures by projecting them into universal existence, keeping them on the...

me atormenta tu amor que no me sirve de puente porque un puente no se sostiene de un solo lado…

La historia es una increíble cantidad de manotazos por todos lados, algunos agarran la manija y otros se quedan con los dedos en el aire, pero cuando sumás el todo por ahí te da la...

In quoting others, we cite ourselves.

We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe.

Skill alone cannot teach or produce a great short story, which condenses the obsession of the creature; it is a hallucinatory presence manifest from the first sentence to fascinate the reader, to make him lose...

Mas não, o que verdadeiramente me exasperava era saber que nunca mais voltaria a estar tão preta da minha liberdade quanto estive naquela época em que me sentia encurralado pelo mundo-Maga, e que a ansiedade...

Ma le cose invisibili hanno bisogno di incarnarsi, le idee cadono a terra come colombe morte.

I sometimes longed for someone who, like me, had not adjusted perfectly with his age, and such a person was hard to find; but I soon discovered cats, in which I could imagine a condition...

Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies.

All European writers are ‘slaves of their baptism,’ if I may paraphrase Rimbaud; like it or not, their writing carries baggage from an immense and almost frightening tradition; they accept that tradition or they fight...

Aunque hiciéramos tantas veces el amor la felicidad tenía que ser otra cosa, algo quizá más triste que esta paz y este placer, un aire como de unicornio o isla, una caída interminable en la...

…y yo tenía unas ganas de llorar, ésa es otra cosa que no puedo impedir, de golpe se me quiebra la voz y veo todo nublado, justo cuando necesitaría estar más tranquilo para decir lo...

Cuando los zapatos aprietan, buena señal. Algo cambia ahí, algo que nos muestra, que sordamente nos pone, nos plantea. Por eso los monstruos son tan populares y los diarios se extasían con los terneros bicéfalos....

(memory is) A strange echo, which stores its replicas according to some other acoustic than consciousness or expectation.

I think it is vanity to want to put into a story anything but the story itself.

Así andaban, Punch y Judy, atrayéndose y rechazándose como hace falta si no se quiere que el amor termine en cromo o en romanza sin palabras. Pero el amor, esa palabra…

Being alive always seems to be the price of something.

La Maga did not know that my kisses were like eyes which began to open up beyond her, and that I went along outside as if I saw a different concept of the world, the...

Come sleep with me: We won’t make Love,Love will make us.

Memory weaves and traps us at the same time according to a scheme in which we do not participate: we should never speak of our memory, for it is anything but ours; it works on...

Nothing is more comical than seriousness understood as a virtue that has to precede all important literature

Amor mío, no te quiero por vos ni por mí ni por los dos juntos, no te quiero porque la sangre me llame a quererte, te quiero porque no sos mía, porque estás del otro...

Now that I think about it, it seems to me that’s what Idiocy is: the ability to be enthusiastic all the time about anything you like, so that a drawing on the wall does not...

A Oliveira le gustaba hacer el amor con la Maga porque nada podía ser más importante para ella y al mismo tiempo, de una manera difícilmente comprensible, estaba como por debajo de su placer, se...

Lo que mucha gente llama amar consiste en elegir una mujer y casarse con ella. La eligen, te lo juro, los he visto. Como si se pudiera elegir en el amor, como si no fuera...

The archive of supposed photocopies (I.E. memory) actually offers up strange creatures; the green paradise of childhood loves that Baudelaire recalled is for many a future in reverse, an obverse of hope in the face...