Gaurav Sagar > Recent Status Updates

I'm with these poor slobs who have no books to show, who have no literature besides their own soul, and who are suffocating to death due to the fact they exist without having taken that mysterious, transcendental exam that makes one eligible to live.

My dream even failed in its metaphors and depictions. My empire didn't even happen among the old playing cards. My march of triumph didn't get as far as as a teapot or an old cat. I'll die as I've lived, amid all the junk on the outskirts, sold by weight among the postscripts of the broken.

To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think. To know yourself in a flash, as I did in this moment, is to have a fleeing notion of the intimate monad, the soul's magic word. But that sudden light scorches everything, consumes everything. It stripped us naked of even ourselves.

I envy all people, because I'm not them. Since this always seemed to me like the most impossible of all impossibilities, it's what I yearned for every day, and despaired of in every sad moment.

Literature-which is art married to thought, and realization untainted by reality- seems to me the end towards which all human effort would have to strive, if were truly human and not just a welling up of our animal self. To express something is to converse its virtue and take away its terror. Fields are greener in their description than in their actual greenness.

The only way to be in agreement with life is to disagree with ourselves. Absurdity is divine.

fais ce que dois, adv (Do your duty, come what may).
- Leo Tolstoy.

A writer who does not write is a monster who invites madness.
-Franz Kafka.

Everything that was profound with regard to broadening the point of view, making it more extensive, has been said. Nowadays we have no option but to repeat.

When I did not know life, I wrote; now that I know its meaning, I have nothing more to write.

I write so as not to be written. For many years I was written in my life, I acted out a story. I suppose I write in order to write others, to operate on the imagination, the revelation, the knowledge of others. Possibly on the literary behavior of others.
- Fogwill

Art is the opposite of silence, constituting one of the signs of that complicity which joins us to men in our common struggle. For someone who has lost that complicity and has sided completely with rejection, neither language nor art converse their expression. This is, no doubt, the reason why that novel of a denial was written: precisely because it was the novel of a denial.

As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted, language is just no damn good- I use it because I have to, but I don't put any trust in it.
- Marcel Duchamp

I shan't write a novel, but at least I'll sound like a novelist.

Had I mentioned to someone around 1795 that I planned to write, anyone with any sense would have told me to write for two hours every day, with or without inspiration. Their advice would have enabled me to benefit from the ten years of life I totally wasted for inspiration.
- Stendhal

I tried in vain to be other pieces of furniture, but even that was denied me. So I have been a single piece of furniture my whole life, which is, after all, no mean achievement when one considers that the rest is silence.

Everything remains, but changes; the everlasting is repeated mortally in the new, which is gone in a flash.

Some people decide not to write because of a conviction that they are nobody.

Am I wizened youth? Is that the true, the supreme terror, to discover that I am wizened youth whose cries no one can hear? And that the poor wizened youth is me?

Perhaps we were heading towards our souls, or the tormented souls of our forefathers, towards the endless pain spread before our sleepy or tearful eyes, our spent or humiliated eyes, by all the good and bad things we and others had done.

My country was not in healthy state. This is no time to dream, I said to myself, I must act on my principles. This is no time to go chasing rainbows, I said, I must be a patriot. In Chile things were not going well. For me, things had been going well but not for my country. I am not a fanatical nationalist but I do sincerely love the land of my birth. Chile, my Chile. What on earth has come over you ?

I never pretended I wasn't member of Opus Dei, young man, I say to the wizened youth, although I can no longer see him, although I no longer know if he is behind me or off to the side or lost in the mangrove swamps that line the river. I never made a secret of it. Everyone knew. Everyone in the Chile knew.

If the child was dying, they should have called a doctor. If the child had already been dead for some time, they should have been saying novenas. They should have been tending his grave.

Whether or not the realization of a lifelong dream had surpassed all expectation, it had, in a sense overshot its mark- and plunged into a nightmare.

I wandered through various public rooms, glory below, gloom above: for the look of lust always is gloomy; lust is never quite sure- even when the velvety victim is locked up in one's dungeon- that some rival devil or influential god may still not abolish one's prepared triumph.

The orange blossom would have scarcely withered on the grave

It will be seen from them that for all the devil's inventiveness, the scheme remained daily the same. First he would tempt me and then thwart me, leaving me with a dull pain in the very root of my being.

Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with !

My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom

It is impossible to persuade a man who does not disagree, but smiles.