Pili > Pili's Quotes

“Hace tiempo, cuando se estrenó Grupo salvaje, de Sam Peckinpah, en la rueda de prensa una periodista alzó la mano y preguntó en tono inquisitivo: «¿Qué necesidad creen que hay en mostrar tanta sangre?». Ernest Borgnine, uno de los actores, respondió con aire perplejó: «Pero, señora, es que, cuando te disparan, sangras». La película se filmó en plena época de la guerra del Vietnam.

Me gusta esta frase. Posiblemente sea uno de los principios básicos de la realidad. Aceptar las cosas difíciles de desentrañar como cosas difíciles de desentrañar, aceptar el hecho de sangrar. Disparar y sangrar.

Es que, cuando te disparan, sangras.”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“And did I pass?" The face of the old woman on my right was unreadable in the gathering dusk. On my left the younger woman said, "You don't pass or fail at being a person, dear.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“There was a girl, and her uncle sold her. Put like that it seems so simple.

No man, proclaimed Donne, is an island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived and then by some means or other, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes- forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'll mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection) but still unique.

Without individuals we see only numbers, a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, "casualties may rise to a million." With individual stories, the statistics become people- but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. Look, see the child's swollen, swollen belly and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, this skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted distended caricature of a human child? And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies' own myriad squirming children?

We draw our lines around these moments of pain, remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearllike, from our souls without real pain.

Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.

A life that is, like any other, unlike any other.

And the simple truth is this: There was a girl, and her uncle sold her.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“It was as if some people believed there was a divide between the books that you were permitted to enjoy and the books that were good for you, and I was expected to choose sides. We were all expected to choose sides. And I didn't believe it, and I still don't.

I was, and still am, on the side of books you love.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

“Pocas cosas marcan tanto a un lector como el primer libro que realmente se abre camino hasta su corazón. Aquellas primeras imágenes, el eco de esas palabras que creemos haber dejado atrás, nos acompañan toda la vida y esconden un palacio en nuestra memoria al que, tarde o temprano –no importa cuántos libros leamos, cuántos mundos descubramos, cuánto aprendamos u olvidemos–, vamos a regresar.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Los libros son espejos: sólo se ve en ellos lo que uno ya lleva dentro.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“どうしてみんなこれほどまで孤独にならなくてはならにのだろう、僕はそう思った。どうしてそんなに孤独になる必要があるのだ。これだけ多くの人々がこの世界に生きていて、それぞれに他者の中に何かを求めあっていて、なのになぜ我々はここまで孤絶しなくてはならないのだ。何のために？この惑星は人々の寂寥を滋養として回転を続けているのか。
¿Por qué nos sentimos tan solos? ¿Qué necesidad hay? ¿Por qué y para qué aislarnos del resto de la gente si somos tantos los que vivimos en este mundo y cada uno de nosotros busca y espera algo de los demás? ¿Acaso este planeta gira únicamente para nutrirse de la desolación de las personas?”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“しかし自分について語ろうとするとき、僕は常に軽い混乱に巻き込まれることになる。「自分とはなにか」。
Sin embargo, cuando intento hablar de mi mismo siempre termino ligeramente envuelto en confusión. ¿Quién soy yo?”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“Home is watching the moon rise over the open, sleeping land and having someone you can call to the window, so you can look together.”
― Stephen King, 11/22/63

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Para leer en forma interrogativa

Has visto
verdaderamente has visto
la nieve los astros los pasos afelpados de la brisa
Has tocado
de verdad has tocado
el plato el pan la cara de esa mujer que tanto amas
Has vivido
como un golpe en la frente
el instante el jadeo la caída la fuga
Has sabido
con cada poro de la piel sabido
que tus ojos tus manos tu sexo tu blando corazón
había que tirarlos
había que llorarlos
había que inventarlos otra vez.”
― Julio Cortazar

“In other words: It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not. Or, more bluntly: Wherever I am not is the place where I am myself. Or else, taking the bull by the horns: Anywhere out of the world.”
― Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy

“But I know nothing of time. I am new every day. I am born when I wake up in the morning, I grow old during the day, and I die at night when I go to sleep. It is not my fault. And I am doing so well today. I am doing so much better than I have ever done before.”
― Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy

“...things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Wasn’t friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely?”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Sometimes he wakes so far from himself that he can’t even remember who he is. “Where am I?” he asks, desperate, and then, “Who am I? Who am I?”
And then he hears, so close to his ear that it is as if the voice is originating inside his own head, Willem’s whispered incantation. “You’re Jude St. Francis. You are my oldest, dearest friend. You’re the son of Harold Stein and Julia Altman. You’re the friend of Malcolm Irvine, of Jean-Baptiste Marion, of Richard Goldfarb, of Andy Contractor, of Lucien Voigt, of Citizen van Straaten, of Rhodes Arrowsmith, of Elijah Kozma, of Phaedra de los Santos, of the Henry Youngs.
“You’re a New Yorker. You live in SoHo. You volunteer for an arts organization; you volunteer for a food kitchen.
“You’re a swimmer. You’re a baker. You’re a cook. You’re a reader. You have a beautiful voice, though you never sing anymore. You’re an excellent pianist. You’re an art collector. You write me lovely messages when I’m away. You’re patient. You’re generous. You’re the best listener I know. You’re the smartest person I know, in every way. You’re the bravest person I know, in every way.
“You’re a lawyer. You’re the chair of the litigation department at Rosen Pritchard and Klein. You love your job; you work hard at it.
“You’re a mathematician. You’re a logician. You’ve tried to teach me, again and again.
“You were treated horribly. You came out on the other end. You were always you.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things. You take all you want from a person - sexual chemistry, let's say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty - and you get to pick three of them.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“You are willing to die, you coward, but not to live.”
― Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf

“I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“That life - whatever else it is - is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“You know what I think?" she says. "That people's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn't matter as far as the maintenance of life is concerned. They're all just fuel. Advertising fillers in the newspaper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills: when you feed 'em to the fire, they're all just paper. The fire isn't thinking 'Oh, this is Kant,' or 'Oh, this is the Yomiuri evening edition,' or 'Nice tits,' while it burns. To the fire, they're nothing but scraps of paper. It's the exact same thing. Important memories, not-so-important memories, totally useless memories: there's no distinction--they're all just fuel.”
― Haruki Murakami, After Dark

“None of us really changes over time. We only become more fully what we are.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat

“There are two basic coping mechanisms. One consists of dreading the chaos, fighting it and abusing oneself after losing, building a structured life of work/marriage/gym/reunions/children/depression/affair/divorce/alcoholism/recovery/heart attack, in which every decision is a reaction against the fear of the worst (make children to avoid being forgotten, fuck someone at the reunion in case the opportunity never comes again, and the Holy Grail of paradoxes: marry to combat loneliness, then plunge into that constant marital desire to be alone). This is the life that cannot be won, but it does offer the comforts of battle—the human heart is content when distracted by war.

“The second mechanism is an across-the-board acceptance of the absurd all around us. Everything that exists, from consciousness to the digestive workings of the human body to sound waves and bladeless fans, is magnificently unlikely. It seems so much likelier that things would not exist at all and yet the world shows up to class every morning as the cosmos takes attendance. Why combat the unlikeliness? This is the way to survive in this world, to wake up in the morning and receive a cancer diagnosis, discover that a man has murdered forty children, discover that the milk has gone sour, and exclaim, 'How unlikely! Yet here we are,' and have a laugh, and swim in the chaos, swim without fear, swim without expectation but always with an appreciation of every whim, the beauty of screwball twists and jerks that pump blood through our emaciated veins.”
― Jaroslav Kalfar, Spaceman of Bohemia

“I felt lonely and content at the same time. I believe that is a rare kind of happiness.”
― Stephen King, Bag of Bones

“This is how we go on: one day at a time, one meal at a time, one pain at a time, one breath at a time. Dentists go on one root-canal at a time; boat-builders go on one hull at a time. If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T. We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind us as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things - fish and unicorns and men on horseback - but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightening flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on.”
― Stephen King, Bag of Bones

“Life is not a zero‐sum game. It owes us nothing, and things just happen the way they do. Sometimes they’re fair and everything makes sense; sometimes they’re so unfair we question everything. I pulled the mask off the face of Fate, and all I found beneath it was chance.”
― Benedict Wells, Vom Ende der Einsamkeit

“It’s . . . From the moment we’re born we’re on the Titanic. We’re going down, we won’t survive this, it’s already been decided. Nothing can change that. But we can choose whether we’re going to run around screaming in panic, or whether we’re like the musicians who play on, bravely and with dignity, although the ship is sinking.”
― Benedict Wells, Vom Ende der Einsamkeit