Mariana Camelo

“I'm getting old. Exiled ever further from the Rome of childhood in the distant empty provinces of old age, from which there is no return. And Rome no longer answers my letters. Somewhere the past exists as a house or a street that you've left for a short while, for five minutes, and you've found yourself in a strange city. It's been written that the past is a foreign country. Nonsense. The past is my home country. The future is a foreign country, full of strange faces, I won't set foot there.

Let me go back home... my mother told me not to be late.”
― Georgi Gospodinov, Time Shelter

“There is no antidote, he writes, against the opium of time. The winter sun shows how soon the light fades from the ash, how soon night enfolds us. Hour upon hour is added to the sum. Time itself grows old. Pyramids, arches and obelisks are melting pillars of snow. Not even those who have found a place amidst the heavenly constellations have perpetuated their names: Nimrod is lost in Orion, and Osiris in the Dog Star. Indeed, old families last not three oaks.”
― W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

“And the world was not what it had been. It was at an end. And it was in the disposition of these things that, barely an hour before its end, the valleys and the young and the fools would all be in the right, while the mountains and the old and the wise would all be in the wrong.”
― Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March

“Todos los hechos pueden ocurrirle a un hombre, desde el instante de su nacimiento hasta el de su muerte, han sido prefijados por el. Asi, toda negligencia es deliberada, todo casual encuentro una cita, toda humillacion una penitencia, todo fracaso una misteriosa victoria, toda muerte un suicidio. No hay consuelo mas habil que el pensamiento de que hemos elegido nuestras desdichas.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories