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“I had greeted the revolt as a musical ear recognizes a right note.”
― Prisoner of Love
― Prisoner of Love
“Even now - they'll never grow up - Japanese potters still play with accidents. Whether it arises from the clay, the wheel, the kiln or the glaze, they watch out for any irregularity and sometimes even emphasize it. In any case they use it as a starting point for a new adventure. The shape and colour may be perfectly classical, but spoiled by a scratch or being under- or over-fired. So they pursue and develop the flaw, struggling fiercely, lovingly with and against it until it becomes deliberate, an expression of themselves. If they succeed they're overjoyed: the result is modern. Never Tunisian. But not many Swiss bankers take up with Japanese potters.”
― Prisoner of Love
― Prisoner of Love
“Myth, like art, is a language. It expresses a certain type of reality in the only way that reality can be expressed, and it is irreducible to any other form of language.”
― Abaddón el Exterminador
― Abaddón el Exterminador
“And sooner or later that incorruptible universe wound up looking to him like some sad simulacrum, because the world that counts for us is this one, here - the only world that wounds us and pains us and makes us feel our terrible loneliness and hunger, but also the only world that gives us the fullness of existence, this blood, this fire, this love, these hopes for death. The only world that offers us a garden at twilight, the touch of a hand we love, a glance cast on putrefaction, but our own putrefaction: warm and close, carnal.”
― Abaddón el Exterminador
― Abaddón el Exterminador
“You know what happened with physics, at the beginning of the century? Everything began to be called into doubt. The fundamentals, I mean, the very most basic assumptions. It was like a building that creaks and groans and you have to go down to inspect the foundations. People began to be doing not physics but rather meditations on physics. [...]
The same sort of thing has happened in the novel. The foundations have had to be looked into. Which is no coincidence, because it was born at the birth of this Western civilization of ours, and it's followed the same arc, the same trajectory, right down to this moment of collapse. Is there a crisis in the novel or is it rather a novel of crisis? Both. One delves into its essence, its mission, its worth. But it's all been done so far from the outside. There've been attempts to carry out the same examination from within, but one would have to go deeper. A novel in which the novelist him- or herself is included. [...]
I'm not talking about the figure of the writer inside the fiction. I'm talking about the possibility of the extreme case, in which it's the author of the novel that's inside the novel. Not as an observer, though, or a chronicler, or a witness [but as] just another character, the same sort of character as all the rest, which however do come from the soul or spirit or anima of the author. The author would be a man maddened, somehow, and living with his own doubles, aspects of his own self.”
― Abaddón el Exterminador
The same sort of thing has happened in the novel. The foundations have had to be looked into. Which is no coincidence, because it was born at the birth of this Western civilization of ours, and it's followed the same arc, the same trajectory, right down to this moment of collapse. Is there a crisis in the novel or is it rather a novel of crisis? Both. One delves into its essence, its mission, its worth. But it's all been done so far from the outside. There've been attempts to carry out the same examination from within, but one would have to go deeper. A novel in which the novelist him- or herself is included. [...]
I'm not talking about the figure of the writer inside the fiction. I'm talking about the possibility of the extreme case, in which it's the author of the novel that's inside the novel. Not as an observer, though, or a chronicler, or a witness [but as] just another character, the same sort of character as all the rest, which however do come from the soul or spirit or anima of the author. The author would be a man maddened, somehow, and living with his own doubles, aspects of his own self.”
― Abaddón el Exterminador
Maria’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Maria’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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Favorite Genres
Art, Biography, Classics, Fiction, Historical fiction, History, Horror, Memoir, Mystery, Poetry, Psychology, Science fiction, Thriller, Travel, and Nonfiction
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