Dustin Wayne

“Why do I know I exist if I also know I will not?”
― Cărtărescu Mircea

“Maxims & Other Quotes

If you need an adjective or adverb, you're still fishing for he right noun or verb. 34

Was this a true story? It seemed somehow unimaginable, a fantasy of some kind. But he told it with such conviction that, against my own wishes, I believed him.

Was this indeed the essence of storytelling? Did one simply have to relate a tale in a believable fashion, with the authority of the imagination? 36

Memory is a mirror that may easily shatter. 81

Readers become invisible even to themselves. Only the story lives. It’s the fate of the writer, yes, as well, to disappear. ~ Alastair Reid 83

‘There is only now,’ Borges exclaimed with unstoppable force. ‘Act, dear boy! Do not procrastinate! It’s the worst of sins. I’ve thought about this, you see: the progression toward evil. Murder, this is very bad, a sin. It leads to thievery. And thievery, of course, leads to drunkenness and Sabbath-breaking. And Sabbath-breaking leads to incivility and at last procrastination. A slippery slope into the pit!’ 98

Borges: I no longer need to save face. This is one of the benefits of extreme age. Nothing matters much, and very little matters at all. 100

Borges: Believe me, you will one day read Don Quixote with a profound sense of recollection. This happens when you read a classic. It finds you where you have been. 102

Parini: I try not to think of the phallus, except when I can think of nothing else, which is most of the time.
Borges: This is the fate of young men, a limited focus. One of the few advantages of my blindness has been that I no longer focus my eyes on objects of arousal. I look inward now, though the mind has mountains, dangerous cliffs. 105

Borges: Writers are always pirates, marauding, taking whatever pleases them from others, shaping these stolen goods to our purposes. Writers feed off the corpses of those who passed before them, their precursors. On the other hand they invent their precursors. They create them in their own image, as God did with man.108

Borges: Nobody can teach you anything. That’s the first truth. We teach ourselves. 115

Borges: One should avoid strong emotion, especially when it interferes with the work at hand. We have European blood in our veins, you and I. Mine is northern blood. We’re cold people, you see. Warriors. 125

Borges: The influence of Quixote was such that Sancho acquired a taste for literary wisdom. Such wisdom in his aphorisms! ‘One can find a remedy for everything but death.’ Or this: ‘Make yourself into honey and the flies will devour you.’ 151
Borges: You see, I designed my work for the tiniest audience, ‘fit company though few.’ A writer’s imagination should not be diluted by crowds! 151

Borges: If you don’t abandon the spirit, the spirit will not abandon you. 181”
― Jay Parini, Borges and Me: An Encounter

“I had never seen a white man filled with such fear. The remarkable truth, however, was that it was not the pistol, but my language, the fact that I didn’t conform to his expectations, that I could read, that had so disturbed and frightened him.”
― Percival Everett, James

“If there are signs. If, in the next cell an impossible neighbor, because on the other side of the wall are just the cliffs and sea, starts to tap to give you an escape plan with crescents, gears, triangles and crosses. If life is a test of perspicacity, or, what might be one in the same of personality - draw a tree, draw a person. Put these drawings in the order they occurred. Interpret the multicolored butterflies spread over the page. They must appear from where you least expected. Heteroclite and elusive above all, making you doubt not them but yourself. Making you blush before your own paranoia. And making you try to forget it. To return to the pervasive conspiracy of normality.

But the tapping on the wall won’t let you sleep. And the privation of sleep leads to hallucinations and insanity. And in the end, inevitably, to the illusion that you hear tapping on the wall. And all this until the metronome stops. And you have yet to give an answer.”
― Cărtărescu Mircea