Blinding Quotes

“O singurătate cum nu poate trăi nici un om în viața reală, care-ți rupe oasele ca un animal sălbatic, îmi sfârteca organele interne.”
― Mircea Cărtărescu, Orbitor. Aripa stângă

“Dacă mă simțeam privit de cineva, pașii mei deveneau stângaci și automați, ca și când mi-ar fi fost permanent teamă că nu voi mai ști cum se merge și că dintr-un moment într-altul mă voi prăbuși pe asfalt.”
― Mircea Cărtărescu, Orbitor. Aripa stângă

“Și ce mască de tifon, ce mănuși chirurgicale te-ar putea proteja de infecția emanată de amintire?”
― Mircea Cărtărescu, Orbitor. Aripa stângă

“Câtă necrofilie e-n amintire! Câtă fascinație pentru ruină și putrefacție! Câtă scotocire de medic legist prin organe lichefiate! Gândindu-mă la mine de la diferite vârste, ca tot atâtea vieți anterioare consumate, e ca și când aș vorbi despre un șir lung, neîntrerupt de morți, un tunel de corpuri murind unul într-altul. Acum o clipă, cel care scrisese aici, reflectat de lacul întunecat al ceștii de cafea, cuvintele "murind unul într-altul" s-a prăbușit de pe taburet, pielea i-a crăpat, oasele feței i-au devenit aparente, ochii i s-au scurs mustind de un sânge negru. Peste o clipă, cel care va scrie "cel care va scrie" se va prăbuși și el peste pulberea celuilalt. Cum să pătrunzi în acest osuar? Și de ce ai face-o? Și ce mască de tifon, ce mănuși chirurgicale te-ar putea proteja de infecția emanată de amintire?”
― Mircea Cărtărescu, Orbitor. Aripa stângă

“There are gods,’ he said, ‘there is Divinity. The countless grotesque, tragic, false, and crude religions are only sensory organs, ways our world touches what transcends and creates us. They are the insect’s antennae, the grub’s palps, the open eyes of soothsayers, through which we touch? attract? drive off? murder? love? the divinity that approaches. The eternal schizophrenia of religions, tangled in rites and interdictions, stained with visions and blood, inverted against conscience and happiness, and preaching another conscience, another happiness, is like a parricide who wants his father to be king, and kills him to become one himself. Religions are madness, and yet they are the only way, since they are the only way out of our world that the mind (our organ to detect gates and exits) can imagine, the only great purpose for which the universe lives. Because an enormous conspiracy in the world is being plotted against our being: everything, the pencil we touch and feel as hard, the pain that darts through our molars, identical days, the fact that every morning we open our eyes in the same room with the same things in their places, the sun that never suddenly turns green – everything wants to convince us, against all evidence, that existence actually exists, that the world is real, that we are truly living in a true world. That we should be calm, that we should be born, that we should live, that we should die comfortably. But how can the wall exist in front of me? In a single second when the voices in your ears stop, in one pure moment of meditation, all of the demented propaganda collapses, and we begin to shake the bones of our minds awake, trampling down madness with madness. Because everything and everyone, however monstrous or distorted, whether motionless in catatonic dances, rounding their circular retina, clanking rat skulls at the waist, crowned with human teeth, or spit on with gold and myrrh – these images themselves are phantoms produced by neurons, along with acetylcholinesterase. Gods and demons, with cannibalistic mouths or with no mouths at all, say the same thing, always the same thing: You are not from here. Here is not your kingdom. You must leave, you must find your world, the world where you have been and where, without your knowing, you long to be. You have to search for the exit, this is the purpose of your life, for the rules of the game at the level where you are. Everything conspires to convince you that there is no exit, and truly an exit does not exist until you search for it. And in a way, the searching is the exit, as though the space you move through with hope and faith were to harden behind you, and construct your exit tunnel, your own, open only to you, like a pore that spreads suddenly in the flower-petal skin of Divinity. No sect, no church can take you there directly. Prayers and postures cannot help. Churches are like dreams: the vein of ore runs thin through many strata of useless sediment. The art of belief is the art of sorting. But everything in a rite is a sign, an indicator, flickering under centuries of perversion: a wonder, a hallucination, a catastrophe, a bearded face in a triangle of rays – here, there is nothing to find, but from here, you can begin to search. Wonders exploding like a carpet of bombs over Judea. The billion faces of Krishna, permitted for a moment to a few human eyeballs. Turquoise giants, god-goddesses, from the brain of he who listens to Bardo Thodol. Koans and mandalas and the Great Vehicle and the Lesser Vehicle and the light of Tabor and interior prayer. All of the techniques of ecstasy, all of the alkaloids of sacred plants and those distilled (coca and angel dust and speed and acid and grass and Jacob’s ladder and smack), all dreams, all mantras – all of it leads here, to this hall, and you have all arrived here by searching along one of the endlessly multiple paths.”
― Mircea Cărtărescu, Blinding

“Separated by centrifugal force, in the great turbine of Dante, or through fractional distillation in the Deisis of Byzantine icons, Inferno and Paradiso, layer of perfumed oil over layer of stinking pitch, all these in the end are all wisdom. Paradise – the wisdom of the right hand, right hemisphere, feminine, gentle and puffy, endless, still waters, illuminated in their depths by the phosphorescence of terrifying abyssal fish … Hell – wisdom of the left hand, left hemisphere, sudden paracletian fire, the mask that covers, in the crux of destruction, the soul of a dove. Good and evil, two enormous Buddhas erupting over our lives from two volcanoes over our lives, opposing and yet similar principles like magnetic poles, in the end they couple, over a footbridge of nervous fibers, to make the motionless and complicated hemispheres of the great, incomparable Brain that dreams us all.”
― Mircea Cărtărescu, Orbitor. Aripa stângă

“Resting his elbows on a wooden rail, he eagerly breathed in the cool, salty air. It took a few minutes for Fra Armando to notice how odd the southward rushing waters looked. The twilight-colored river had turned to blood. The Friar followed the dizzying rush of lenticular red cells, the size of loaves of bread, the amoeba-like gliding of the white cells, transparent enough to show their darkened nuclei, the snaking spiral worms that must have been malaria germs, the unusual fluorescence of lymph, the currents of glucose and protein. Fascinated and deathly tired, the Friar suddenly sensed that everything was alive, that everything lives, and that the universe does not at all operate like clockwork. Instead, it is a malleable architecture like the human body, a temple of skin, a basilica of scratches, a cenotaph of snot, with no right angles or durable materials, where the person creates his dreams, thoughts, and illusions, his time and his language like a cell secretes a hair or the crystal horn of a nail. And still, the least important cell in the universal body receives, through angel hormones and neural visions, the imperious commandments of God.”
― Mircea Cărtărescu, Orbitor. Aripa stângă

“Que somos las larvas de un ser astral nos lo demuestra nuestro tronco cerebro-espinal. Con la médula espinal a modo de raíz y los dos hemisferios cerebrales como dos cotiledones carnosos, el cerebro guarda un parecido perfecto con los primeros estados de una plantita después de brotar. La carne es la tierra donde ha sido sembrada y cuyos recursos agotará; así también el cerebro será consumido y se arrugará como una nuez para convertirse en un fruto seco, y del centro brotarán, tiernas y luminosas, las dos hojitas, las alas del alma, las alas del espíritu, que abandonarán el semillero de este mundo para, revestidas de la gloria de un cuerpo celestial, ser plantadas en una tierra nueva, bao un cielo nuevo.”
― Mircea Cărtărescu, L'ala esquerra

“Erano in fondo a un oceano e le stelle non erano altro che riflessi delle onde sotto la luna di un altro mondo.”
― Mircea Cărtărescu, Orbitor. Aripa stângă

“Lorsque je pense à moi à des âges divers, soit à autant de vies antérieures consumées, c'est comme si je parlais d'une longue série ininterrompue de morts, d'un tunnel de corps mourant l'un dans l'autre. Il y a un instant, celui qui, reflété par la mare sombre de sa tasse de café, écrivait les mots «mourant l'un dans l'autre» est tombé de son tabouret, sa peau s'est fendue, les os de son visage sont devenus apparents, du sang noir a jailli de ses yeux crevés. Dans un instant, celui qui va écrire «celui qui va écrire» tombera à son tour dans la poussière de l'autre. Comment pénétrer dans cet ossuaire? Et pour quoi faire? Quel masque de gaze, quels gants de chirurgien pourraient protéger contre l'infection émanant du souvenir?”
― Mircea Cărtărescu, Orbitor. Aripa stângă

“Cumplit era că, după cum mergeau vorbele, vechiul refugiu al celor asediați de rău: divinitatea, binele și viața morală, se aliase pentru întâia oară cu tenebrele, pentru a-nfășura lumea în inextricabila pânză de păianjen a nici binelui, nici răului, nici extazului, nici groazei, nici a tuturor laolaltă, nici a vidurilor, ci a Altceva, ceva inuman, nediavolesc și nedivin, de neperceput cu mintea și de neatins cu degetele.”
― Mircea Cărtărescu, Orbitor. Aripa stângă