s.penkevich’s Profile

[A]lmost everyone her age had stepfathers or stepmothers, although they didn’t call them those derogatory names, perhaps because over the years they had accumulated numerous stepfathers and stepmothers—a long string of people whom they began to love but very quickly forgot, since they often disappeared, never to be seen again, or they only reappeared years later, by chance, in the line of the supermarket…She had only one stepfather, for which, she thinks now, she ought to feel fortunate.

It would be better to close the book, close the books, and to face, all at once, not life, which is very big, but the fragile armor of the present. For now, the story goes on and Verónica hasn’t arrived; it’s best to keep that in view, repeat it a thousand and one times: when she comes home, the novel ends—the book continues until she comes home or until Julián is sure that she is not coming home again.

’Walking is for me not only healthy, it is also of service—not only lovely, but also useful.’

The soul of the world had opened and I fantasized that everything wicked, distressing and painful was on the point of vanishing….all notion of the future paled and the past dissolved. In the glowing present, I myself glowed.

Is not all music, ever the most niggardly, beautiful to the person who loves the very being and existence of music? Is not almost any human being you please - even the worst and most unpleasant - loveable to the person who is a friend of man?

I here implement a policy of softheartedness, which has a beauty that is not to be found anywhere else; but I consider a policy of this sort to be indispensible. Propriety enjoins us to be careful to deal as severaly with ourselves as with others, to judge others as mildly as we judge ourselves…

A murderer, nothing more.

A murderer, nothing more.

We mourn our father, for example, but we are left with a legacy, his house, his money and his worldly goods, which we would have to give back to him were he to return, which would put us in a very awkward position and cause us great distress. We might mourn a wife or a husband, but sometimes we discover, although this may take a while, that we live more happily and more comfortably without them or, if we are not too advanced in years, that we can begin anew, with the whole of humanity at our disposal, as it was when we were young; the possibility of choosing without making the old mistakes; the relief of not having to put up with certain annoying habits, because there is always something that annoys us about the person who is always there, at our side or in front or behind or ahead, because marriage surrounds and encircles. We mourn a great writer or a great artist when he or she dies, but there is a certain joy to be had from knowing that the world has become a little more vulgar and a little poorer, and that our own vulgarity and poverty will thus be better hidden or disguised; that he or she is no longer there to underline our own relative mediocrity; that talent in general has taken another step towards disappearing from the face of the earth or slipping further back into the past, from which it should never emerge, where it should remain imprisoned so as not to affront us except perhaps retrospectively, which is less wounding and more bearable. I am speaking of the majority, of course, not everyone.

The worst thing that can happen to anyone, worse than death itself, and the worst thing one can make others dois to return from the place from which no one returns, to come back to life at the wrong time, when you are no longer expected, when it is too late and inappropriate, when the living have assumed you are over and done with and have continued or taken up their lives again, leaving no room for you at all.

I would never know more than what he told me, and so I would never know anything for sure…

Everything becomes a story and ends up drifting about in the same sphere, and then it’s hard to differentiate between what really happened and what is pure invention. Everything becomes a narrative and sounds fictitious even if it’s true.

El enamoramiento - the state of falling or being in love, or perhaps infatuation. I’m referring to the noun, the concept… it’s very rare to have a weakness, a genuine weakness for someone, and for that someone to provoke in us that feeling of weakness. That’s the determining factor, they break down our objectivity and disarm us in perpetuity, so that we can in over every dispute…

[T]hey have merely been overcome or motivated by weariness and a desire to be whole, by their inability to continue lying or keeping silent, to go on remembering what they experienced and did as well as what they imagined, to go on remembering their transformed or invented lives as well as those they actually lived, to forget what really happened and to replace it with a fiction.

How could I explain to Mr. Presley, at that moment, that the tough guys were using nouns in the feminine gender to refer to McGraw, la nena vieja, pesada, la bailona, English nouns have no gender and I wasn’t going to give him a Spanish lesson right there on the dance floor.

"Ah, you didn’t do anything but translate,” the fat gangster—and the most gravely insulted—replies. “Too bad we don’t know if that’s true, we don’t speak English. Whatever Elvis said we didn’t understand, but you we understood, you speak very clearly, in a little bit of a rush like everyone else back in Spain, but we hear you loud and clear and you can rest assured that we’re listening."

He’s killing him, killing him, he is killing him, no one could have seen it coming, death can be as stupid and unexpected as they say, you walk into some dive without ever imagining that everything can end there in the most ridiculous way and in a second, one, two, and three and four, and every second that passes without anyone intervening makes this irreversible death more certain, the death that is happening as we watch…

When you’re being hunted down like that you feel as if your pursuers do nothing but search for you, chase you twenty-four hours a day: you’re convinced that they don’t eat or sleep even for one second, their venomous footsteps are incessant and tireless and there is no rest; they have neither wife nor child nor needs, they don’t need to pee, they don’t pause to chat, they don’t get laid or go to soccer games, they don’t have television sets at home, at most they have a car to pursue you.

[M]y eyes only look back while those of my pursuers look ahead, at my dark back, and so they are bound to catch up with me always.

’Yet, whatever was to come his way would come, he knew, like this—slowly and out of a thick fog. Accidents, meetings unexpected, a figure emerging to put its arms about him: where to discover everything he dreamed of except in a fog. And, thinking of slippery corners, skin suddenly bruised, grappling hooks going blindly through the water: where to lose it all if not in the same white fog.’

‘The great difficulty Hawkes has,’ said William H. Gass in a recent interview with Tin House, ‘is to take something that is so revolting in life and write about it beautifully. That makes people mad, you know? Because they think you’re doing something, you’re advising or approving the situation, which isn’t the case. That’s one reason he liked violence. There are scenes in The Lime Twig that are so beautiful, so awful. That’s art, boy.’

’I know I’ve got a death-wish. I’ve never enjoyed my life, I’ve never liked people. I love the mountains because they are the negation of life, indestructible, inhuman, untouchable, indifferent, as I want to be. Human beings are hateful; I loathe their ugly faces and messy emotions. I’d like to destroy them all, People have always been horrible to me; they’ve always rejected me and betrayed me. Not one of them has ever been kind. Not one single person has even attempted to understand me, to see things from my point of view. They’ve all been against me, ever sine I can remember, even when I was six years old. What sort of human beings are these, who can be inhuman to a child of six? How can I help hating them all? Sometimes they disgust me so much that I feel I can’t go on living among them—that I must escape from the loathsome creatures swarming like maggots all over the earth’

’Why am I locked in this nightmare of violence, isolation and cruelty? Since the universe only exists in my mind, I must have created the place, loathsome, foul as it is. I live alone in my mind, and alone I’m being crushed to suffocation, immured by the walls I have made. It’s unbearable. I can’t possibly live in this terrible, hideous, revolting creation of mine.’

’It was as if she’d always been lost and living in chaos, until this man had appeared like a magician and put everything right. The few brief flashes of happiness she had known before had always been against a permanent background of black isolation, a terrifying utter loneliness, the metaphysical horror of which she’d never been able to convey to any lover or psychiatrist. Now suddenly, miraculously, that terror had gone; she was no longer alone, and could only respond with boundless devotion to the miracle worker.’

‘Since he’d gone, the world had become unnervingly strange. There was nothing she could do and nowhere she could go. She felt lost, lonely, dazed, deprived of everything, even of her identity, which was not strong enough to survive without his constant encouragement and reassurance.’