Matheus > Matheus's Quotes

“Perhaps all we want from reading is to return to that age when we could hold a book and cry, to that time between childhood and adolescence, the sweetest era of our lives.”
― Mircea Cărtărescu, Solenoid

“as he noticed the feeble ticking of his watch, he suddenly realized that he had been escaping all his life, that life had been a constant escape, escape from meaninglessness into music, from music to guilt, from guilt and self-punishment into pure ratiocination, and finally escape from that too, that it was retreat after retreat, as if his guardian angel had, in his own peculiar fashion, been steering him to the antithesis of retreat, to an almost simple-minded acceptance of things as they were, at which point he understood that there was nothing to be understood, that if there was reason in the world it far transcended his own, and that therefore it was enough to notice and observe that which he actually possessed.”
― László Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance

“I’ve dreamed a lot. I’m tired now from dreaming but not tired of dreaming. No one tires of dreaming, because to dream is to forget, and forgetting does not weigh on us, it is a dreamless sleep throughout which we remain awake. In dreams I have achieved everything.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“time cannot do to ordinary things what we timelessly do to one another.”
― William H. Gass, The Tunnel

“… for overstrong was the command to hold fast to each smallest particle of time, to the smallest particle of every circumstance, and to embody all of them in memory as if they could be preserved in memory through all deaths for all times.”
― Hermann Broch, The Death of Virgil

“I have neither one nor the other, and that has been going on for so long now that I have stopped wondering whether it is hate or love which gives us the strength to continue this life of lies, which provides the formidable energy that allows us to go on suffering, and hoping.”
― Georges Perec, Life: A User's Manual

“hay una explicación para el que los padres miren a sus hijos como los miran cuando éstos ya están dormidos y con la luz apagada. Y es que un niño despierto e iluminado difícilmente podría soportar la intensidad de esa mirada tan posesiva como liberadora: su amor sin límites, su infinito agradecimiento, el terror por todo lo que puede llegar a pasarles a los pequeños grandes y, por lo tanto, a los grandes pequeños. Padres e hijos son lo mismo. Unidos hasta que la muerte los separa y proyectándose desde el pasado hacia la eternidad más allá de vientos y de desiertos que no dejan de estirarse como quien se despereza. Gritándose de un lado a otro de un abismo finalmente insalvable, pero igual, siempre y para siempre, planificando puentes en cuyos extremos, unidos pero enfrentados, , aunque se desee que el otro estuviera aquí, sin esperar, ambos emprenden una y otra vez, todas las veces que puedan y se pueda, el cruce sobre le más pleno de los vacíos”
― Rodrigo Fresán, The Invented Part

“I have in my head things I may not have exactly seen, just as you who read this have me.”
― Joseph McElroy, Lookout Cartridge

“For hear us falling. Toward the horizon albeit oblique, for we imagine it isn’t our natural state. We are some power to be here and to have changed toward life even to think distinct from these angels lately to be heard speculating in us as if they were learning to hope. We deserve to know what is in us.”
― Joseph McElroy

“When the sun was rising I doubted its value, as it set I lamented its loss.”
― Evan Dara, The Easy Chain

“And it's a disquieting thought that not even the past is done with, even that continues to change, as if in reality there is only one time, for everything, one time for every purpose under heaven. One single second, one single landscape, in which what happens activates and deactivates what has already happened in endless chain reactions, like the processes that take place in the brain, perhaps, where cells suddenly bloom and die away, all according to the way the winds of consciousness are blowing.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, A Time for Everything

“Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm; not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

“The term ignorant is indeed perhaps an overstatement, implying as it does that something is known somewhere, whereas in reality we are not even sure of this: we in fact cannot aver with any degree of certainty that we are ignorant. Yet this is not so bad; we have at any rate kept our open-mindedness -- that, at least, we may be sure that we have -- and are not in any danger, or so it seems, of freezing into the pious attitudes of those true spiritual bigots whose faces are turned toward eternity and who therefore can see nothing.”
― John Ashbery, Three Poems

“Every artist is linked to a mistake with which he has a particular intimacy. All art draws its origin from an exceptional fault, each work is the implementation of this original fault, from which comes a risky plenitude and new light.”
― Maurice Blanchot