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'When will we all get to be human, Dante?'

Good question, Ari. ❤️

'It is often our mightiest projects that most obviously betray the degree of our insecurity.'

Oh my. ❤️

Insanely thrilled about the Dantesque ambience of the prose! I had not expected this AT ALL 🤩

Bolaño: always getting it right, never getting it wrong!

👏💕

"Again, I must stress that this is my reading now of what happened then. Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time."

"You might even ask me to apply my ‘theory’ to myself and explain what damage I had suffered a long way back and what its consequences might be: for instance, how it might affect my reliability and truthfulness."

Fantastic 💕

“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”

"When we really know the world, we see that it is just a world full of errors.
[...] We mustn’t pretend to ourselves. We may keel over at any moment."
🙈😅

"We want to achieve everything, and we achieve nothing. And naturally we make the highest, the very highest demands of ourselves, completely leaving out of account human nature, which is after all not made to meet the highest demands. The world spirit, as it were, overestimates the human spirit. We are always bound to fail because we set our sights a few hundred per cent higher than is appropriate."

"I began to wonder whether my inability to start work, and more generally my illness and imminent death, were not perhaps due to the poisoned air from the paper factory."

"I have no relatives, I always tell her. I have only intellectual kin. The dead philosophers are my relatives."

"How shall I begin? It’s the simplest thing in the world, I told myself, and I can’t understand why this simplest thing in the world eludes me."

"I needed no one, and so I had no one. But naturally we do need someone, otherwise we inevitably become what I have become: tiresome, unbearable, sick — impossible, in the profoundest sense of the word [...] but it is equally mistaken to say that we actually need someone. Sometimes we need someone, sometimes no one, and sometimes we need someone and no one."

"the room is quivering, crumbling, books
falling;
an avalanche of grammar -
complex sentences wallop and whack,
and I am buried under a rush of full stops.
Slashed into pieces by subordinate clauses.
Stifled by epilogues."

"Now I wonder if my body were paper
I'd catch your eye.

Perhaps you'd take a pen
and fill me with words,
then strike through my flesh --
scoring out the lines that no longer make
sense

and write me new
with another beginning."

❤️

"To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul. To Miss Mackay it is a putting in of something that is not there, and that is not what I call education, I call it intrusion [...]
Now Miss Mackay has accused me of putting ideas into my girls' heads, but in fact that is her practice and mine is quite the opposite. Never let it be said that I put ideas into your heads."
This book! ♥️

"It is well, when in difficulties, to say never a word, neither black nor white. Speech is silver but silence is golden."

❣️

"Don't you understand about yourself yet? You're going to be a teacher."
Suddenly Sloane seemed very distant, and the walls of the office receded. Stoner felt himself suspended in the wide air, and he heard his voice ask, "Are you sure?"
"I'm sure," Sloane said softly.
"How can you tell? How can you be sure?"
"It's love, Mr. Stoner," Sloane said cheerfully. "You are in love. It's as simple as that."

❣️

"From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books."
♥️

Ah, what the hell! A quick one to get into the Christmas spirit 🎄 ☃️

"But it wore you down, the magic. Even now, only in November, when night fell so early it felt like every street was beating back the dark every way it knew how"

"Memory’s not a reel, not a film you can run backwards and forwards at will: it’s that flash of startled fur, the slither of silk between the fingers, the duplicated texture of hair or bone. It’s an image blurring, caught on the move: as if in one of my family snapshots, taken before cameras got so foolproof that any fool could capture the moment."

'I venture that aesthetic value is inseparable from use, but also that our
engagements with texts are extraordinarily varied, complex, and often
unpredictable in kind. The pragmatic, in this sense, neither destroys
not excludes the poetic. To propose that the meaning of literature
lies in its use is to open up for investigation a vast terrain of practices, expectations, emotions, hopes, dreams, and interpretations'