Andrés Borja > Andrés's Quotes

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden

“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?”
― Ernest Hemingway

“My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres; it’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky.”
― Alan Moore

“Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?”
― Albert Camus

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Busco el recogimiento, porque suele ser más interesante la literatura que la vida. No sé si es paradójico, pero me gusta muchísimo la vida porque, digan lo que digan, se parece a una gran novela.”
― Enrique Vila-Matas, Dietario voluble

“Horroriza el nivel de ignorancia de este país y, sobre todo, de satisfacción con esa ignorancia. Es un país con mucha inquina y mucha mala leche, de escasa —por no decir nula— categoría moral. Y a mí me parece que si eres mínimamente culto, estás perdido.”
― Enrique Vila-Matas, Dietario voluble

“¿Será que lo doméstico -ese veneno que acaba con las pasiones y que también llamamos cotidianidad- lo arruina todo? [...] ¿Es el genio, como insisten algunos, una persona insoportablemente normal en la vida cotidiana? ¿Se puede ser genial todo el rato?”
― Enrique Vila-Matas, Dietario voluble

“Citar es respirar literatura para no ahogarse entre los tópicos castizos y ocurrentes que le vienen a uno a la pluma cuando se empeña en esa vulgaridad suprema de «no deberle nada a nadie». Y es que, en el fondo, quien no cita no hace más que repetir pero sin saberlo ni elegirlo.”
― Enrique Vila-Matas, Dietario voluble

“Si vas a intentarlo, que sea a fondo. Si no, mejor que ni empieces. Puede que pierdas familia, mujer, amistad, trabajos y hasta la cabeza. Puede que no comas en días, puede que te congeles en un banco de la calle. No importa. Es una prueba de resistencia para saber que puedes hacerlo. Y lo harás. A pesar del rechazo y de la incertidumbre, será mejor que cualquier cosa que hayas imaginado. Te sentirás a solas con los dioses, y las noches arderán en llamas. Cabalgarás la vida hasta la risa perfecta. Es la única batalla que cuenta.”
― Charles Bukowski

“La literatura no es un oficio, es una enfermedad; uno no escribe para ganar dinero o caer bien a la gente, sino porque intenta curarse, porque está infectado, porque lo ha ganado la tristeza.”
― Ricardo Menéndez Salmón

“Personas de gran exigencia intelectual y potentísima inteligencia son hoy plenamente conscientes de que su destino en la vida —explicar lo que han entendido y que los otros no comprenden o no quieren ver— no sirve para nada porque a los otros ni les incumbe ni lo comprenden ni lo quieren saber.”
― Enrique Vila-Matas, Dietario voluble

“Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion -- these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Ante ciertos libros, uno se pregunta: ¿quién los leerá? Y ante ciertas personas uno se pregunta: ¿qué leerán? Y al fin, libros y personas se encuentran.”
― André Gide

“People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.”
― Logan Pearsall Smith

“Paranoids are not paranoid because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.”
― Thomas Pynchon

“Why should things be easy to understand?”
― Thomas Pynchon

“I came," she said, "hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy."
Cherish it!" cried Hilarious, fiercely. "What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by it's little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.”
― Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“I know you, I know you. You're the only serious person in the room, aren't you, the only one who understands, and you can prove it by the fact that you've never finished a single thing in your life. You're the only well-educated person, because you never went to college, and you resent education, you resent social ease, you resent good manners, you resent success, you resent any kind of success, you resent God, you resent Christ, you resent thousand-dollar bills, you resent Christmas, by God, you resent happiness, you resent happiness itself, because none of that's real. What is real, then? Nothing's real to you that isn't part of your own past, real life, a swamp of failures, of social, sexual, financial, personal...spiritual failure. Real life. You poor bastard. You don't know what real life is, you've never been near it. All you have is a thousand intellectualized ideas about life. But life? Have you ever measured yourself against anything but your own lousy past? Have you ever faced anything outside yourself? Life! You poor bastard.”
― William Gaddis, The Recognitions