JJ Cross > JJ's Quotes

“Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.”
― Derek Walcott, Collected Poems, 1948-1984

“As the hours, the days, the weeks, the seasons slip by, you detach yourself from everything. You discover, with something that sometimes almost resembles exhilaration, that you are free. That nothing is weighing you down, nothing pleases or displeases you. You find, in this life exempt from wear and tear and with no thrill in it other than these suspended moments, in almost perfect happiness, fascinating, occasionally swollen by new emotions. You are living in a blessed parenthesis, in a vacuum full of promise, and from which you expect nothing. You are invisible, limpid, transparent. You no longer exist. Across the passing hours, the succession of days, the procession of the seasons, the flow of time, you survive without joy and without sadness. Without a future and without a past. Just like that: simply, self evidently, like a drop of water forming on a drinking tap on a landing.”
― Georges Perec, Things: A Story of the Sixties / A Man Asleep

“Books are finite, sexual encounters are finite, but the desire to read and to fuck is infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace.”
― Roberto Bolano

“Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people's ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“If you're going to say what you want to say, you're going to hear what you don't want to hear.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Insufferable Gaucho

“So everything lets us down, including curiosity and honesty and what we love best. Yes, said the voice, but cheer up, it's fun in the end.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“What twisted people we are. How simple we seem, or at least pretend to be in front of others, and how twisted we are deep down. How paltry we are and how spectacularly we contort ourselves before our own eyes, and the eyes of others...And all for what? To hide what? To make people believe what?”
― Roberto Bolaño

“There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

“Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I’d rather not talk about it, because I didn’t understand it.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

“Without turning, the pharmacist answered that he liked books like The Metamorphosis, Bartleby, A Simple Heart, A Christmas Carol. And then he said that he was reading Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. Leaving aside the fact that A Simple Heart and A Christmas Carol were stories, not books, there was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist, who ... clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecouchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze a path into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.”
― Roberto Bolano, 2666

“Only in chaos are we conceivable.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.”
― Wittgenstein Ludwig

“Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.”
― Robert Frost

“But perhaps the greatest escapism of all is to take refuge in the domesticity of the past, the home that history and literature become, avoiding the one moment of time in which we are not at home, yet have to live: the present.”
― Tim Parks

“Nothing good ever comes of love. What comes of love is always something better”
― Roberto Bolaño, Amulet

“We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain”
― Roberto Bolaño, Last Evenings on Earth

“Every hundred feet the world changes”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“we interpret life at moments of the deepest desperation.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

“Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it's knowledge and questions.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“The secret story is the one we'll never know, although we're living it from day to day, thinking we're alive, thinking we've got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn't matter.”
― Roberto Bolaño

“The truth is we never stop being children, terrible children covered in sores and knotty veins and tumors and age spots, but ultimately children, in other words we never stop clinging to life because we are life.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“You have to know how to look even if you don't know what you're looking for.”
― Roberto Bolaño

“Being alone makes us stronger. That’s the honest truth. But it’s cold comfort, since even if I wanted company no one will come near me anymore.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

“Every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

“When I was done traveling, I returned convinced of one thing: we're nothing.”
― Roberto Bolaño

“Drink up, boys, drink up and don’t worry, if we finish this bottle we’ll go down and buy another one. Of course, it won’t be the same as the one we’ve got now, but it’ll still be better than nothing. Ah, what a shame they don’t make Los Suicidas mezcal anymore, what a shame that time pases, don’t you think? what a shame that we die, and get old, and everything good goes galloping away from us.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

“Did Jesus Christ, he asked, suspect that someday his church would spread to the farthest corners of Earth? Did Jesus Christ, he asked, ever have what we, today, call an idea of the world? Did Jesus Christ, who apparently knew everything, know that the world was round and to the east lived the Chinese (this sentence he spat out, as if it cost him great effort to utter it) and to the west the primitive peoples of America? And he answered himself, no, although of course in a way having an idea of the world is easy, everybody has one, generally an idea restricted to one's village, bound to the land, to the tangible and mediocre things before one's eyes, and this idea of the world, petty, limited, crusted with the grime of the familiar, tends to persist and acquire authority and eloquence with the passage of time.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.”
― W.G. Sebald, Vertigo

“It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last, just as when we have accepted an invitation we duly arrive in a certain house at a given time.”
― W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz