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You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again […] and your relationship to the river, and the river’s relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more complex and more reassuring than a mere lack of identity.

Don Giovanni is the demon of unalloyed immanence, a prisoner of worldly appearances, and the martyr of a more and more deceptive and despicable sensation, whereas Tristan is the prisoner of a realm lying beyond night and day and the martyr of a rapture which is transformed at death into unalloyed bliss.

Si un monstruo, dispuesto a hacerlo todo por ti, te persiguiera, no dudarías ni por un instante en eliminarlo, ¿no es cierto?

[E]l salvajismo es parte de toda civilización. Sea éste como mero objeto de exotismo observado e interpretado. Sea como espejo en el que los hombres más decentes y evolucionados buscan descifrar su misterio atávico. Pero […] De Bry se refiere a un salvajismo de otra índole: el que caracterizó a los conquistadores españoles.

Después de las matanzas queda una pausa detrás de la cual se adivina nuestro deseo secreto de saborear otras fronteras del horror.

[C]headboard alternations of the light, the steel and steam of the twentieth century, the running man with the history of the continent on his face.

[I]f it’s worth having, the red man shall not be allowed to keep it.

Todavía me volví, ojeando. Siempre quería ver a Diadorín. El bienquerer de uno despidiéndose como una risa y sollozo, en este en medio de la vida.

«Olereré
Bahiana…
Yo me iba
y ya no voy…
Yo hago
que voy
allá dentro, oh bahiana:
¡y me vuelvo
de enmedio
p’atrás!»

El sertón no tiene ventanas ni puertas. Y la regla es así: o usted gobierna bendito el sertón, o el sertón maldito le gobierna… ¿Rechacé aquello?

La miseria en mi mano […] Entonces ¿no sé si vendí? Le digo a usted: mi miedo es éste. ¿No venden todos? Le digo a usted: el diablo no existe, ni hay, y a él le vendí yo el alma… Mi miedo es éste. ¿A quién he vendido? Mi miedo es éste, señor mío: entonces, el alma, la vende uno solo y sin ningún comprador.

I swallowed hard against a wave of nausea, of nausea and something else, they were indistinguishable, seven years, I thought, seven years undone, a betrayal of vocation. But I rejected this even as I thought it, it wasn’t my vocation, it was just something I had done, a way I had passed the time; don’t be so pious, something said in me, and something else cringed away.

Sex had never been joyful for me, or almost never, it has always been fraught with shame and anxiety and fear, all of which vanished at the sight of his smile, simply vanished, it poured a kind of cleanness over everything we did. He had given me so much, I thought, for all that he couldn't give, [...]

But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the same thing as walking on the road; the perspective, to say the very least, changes only with the journey; only when the road has, abruptly and treacherously, and with an absoluteness that permits no argument, turned or dropped or risen is one able to see all that one could not have seen from any other place.

What a curiosity it was to hold a pen—nothing but a small pointed stick, after all, oozing hieroglyphic puddles: a pen that speaks, miraculously, Polish. A lock removed from the tongue. Otherwise the tongue is chained to the teeth and the palate. An immersion into the living language: all at once this cleanliness, this capacity, this power to make a history, to tell, to explain.
To retrieve, to reprieve!
To lie.

To “come along” meant that he would change his ways and consent to be the husband she had traveled so far to find. It was he who, unforgivably, taught her that there are people in the world for whom “coming along” is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive. For ten years he came along, but when he left her he was the same man she had married.

He remembered the people he had seen in the city, whose eyes held no love for him. And he thought of their feet so swift and brutal, and the dark gray clothes they wore, and how when they passed they did not see him, or, if they saw him, they smirked. And how their lights, unceasing, crashed on and off above him, and how he was a stranger there.

At times abandon meaning to impulse. Let the words be the facts. This was the nature of our walks—to register what was out there, all the scattered rhythms of circumstance and occurrence, and to reconstruct it as human voice.

If you know you’re worth nothing, only a gamble with death can gratify your vanity.

Ah, para no tener miedo es para lo que se recurre a la rabia.

The guest seems not only to have taken away with him the lives of those who live there, but seems to have to divide them from each other, leaving each one alone with the pain of loss and a no less painful sense of waiting.

In order to be able to use his intelligence—really or realistically—he would have to be entirely remade from the beginning. His social class lives its true life in him. So it is not by understanding or admitting things but only by acting that he will be able to grasp the reality of which his bourgeois reason deprives him; only by acting as if in a dream; or better, acting before deciding.

¿Una noticia es cosa que se saca, a capricho, del fin del sol? … ¿La tristeza es notica? … La fantasía, mía ahora, en esta conversación, usted me la ataje. Si no, diga usted: ¿lo negro es negro?, ¿lo blanco es blanco? O cuándo es cuando la vejez comienza, surgiendo de dentro de la juventud.

The distance traveled might tempt one to put on airs, but you resisted, you smoothed over, and that was precisely the point.

Awareness deluges when not modulated, when not finely tuned. It can become a kind of panic.

[...] me parece que el sentir de uno da vueltas, pero de cierto modo, rodando en sí, pero con reglas. ¿El mucho placer se vuelve miedo, el miedo va y se vuelve odio, el odio se vuelve esas desesperaciones? la desesperación es bueno que se vuelva mayor tristeza, consolante entonces para el un amor —cuanta añoranza—...; entonces, ya viene otra esperanza... Pero la brasita de todo es tan sólo el mismo carbón solo.

Ahora podemos rescatar del olvido
esos siglos de dolor que son nuestra herencia
ha habido una especie de segundo reparto
y tenemos derecho a vivir nuestra vida.

La noción de ch'ixi […] plantea la coexistencia en paralelo de múltiples diferencias culturales que no se confunden, sino que antagonizan o se complementan. Cada una se reproduce a sí misma desde la profundidad del pasado y se relaciona con las otras de forma contenciosa.

Al considerar los acontecimientos presentes de nuestra vida, oscilamos constantemente entre la fe en el azar y la evidencia del determinismo. Sin embargo, cuando se trata del pasado, no tenemos la menor duda: nos parece obvio que todo ha ocurrido del modo en que, efectivamente, tenía que ocurrir.

Durante eso mismos años en los que él intentaba acceder a la vida sin éxito, las sociedades occidentales resbalaban hacia una zona oscura. En aquel verano de 1976 ya era evidente que todo aquello iba a acabar mal. La violencia física, la manifestación más perfecta de la individuación, iba a reaparecer en Occidente a consecuencia del deseo.