The Lyric Valuables

[theclassicsreader]

“The right ending is an open door you can’t see too far out of.”

— Michael Ondaatje, Coming Through Slaughter

[tyler-cain]

“I witnessed doom, though. It was around me. But at the time, I thought the bad luck of other people reaffirmed that I was doing okay.”

—Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room

[philosophybits]

“A man could say every day that he wanted to change his life, was going to change it, and every day the lament became merely a part of the life he was already living, so that the desire for change was in fact a kind of stasis that allowed the unchanged life to continue, because at least the man knew to disapprove of it, which reassured him not all was lost.”

— Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room (via quotespile)

[tyler-cain]

“I think now that if I had had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home.”

—James Baldwin in Giovanni’s Room

[tyler-cain]

“Dostoevsky was no belief in anything but the greasy earthbound world where humans wandered, fought, corrupted, and killed....Dostoevsky was something vast—universe-sized—a universe that had order, but not fixed and artificial Greek order. It was a scattered realm of chaotic trials...”

—from Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room

[darklingpearl]

“Somewhere in my throat there must be gold, even if it does sound like tin.”

— Franz Kafka, from a letter to Felice Bauer written c. August 1916 (via violentwavesofemotion)

[tyler-cain]

“Friday

Certainty that I will never be able to write.

*

Saturday

Remembering the line I wrote down yesterday about being sure that writing is impossible for me, it’s the only means of being able to start writing: from emptiness, from stupidity, a slow and clumsy progress.”

—Ricardo Piglia in The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: A Day in the Life

[tyler-cain]

WCW’s business card.

[tyler-cain]

“If you set enough tangents around a circle, you begin to re-create the shape of the circle itself.”

—Teju Cole in “Death in the Browser Tab”

[tyler-cain]

“It was academic at first. I wrote of silences, nights, I expressed the inexpressible. I defined vertigos.”

— Rimbaud quoted in Ricardo Piglia’s The Diaries of Emilio Renzi 

[tyler-cain]

“Nadie sabe leer, nadie lee. Porque para leer...hay que saber asociar.”

—de Respiración Artificial, Ricardo Piglia

[tyler-cain]

“...[U]n descubrimiento: la inesperada asociación de dos hechos aislados, de dos ideas que, al unirse, producen algo nuevo.”

—de Respiración Artificial, Ricardo Piglia

[tyler-cain]

“...[O]ne must attempt to make senselessness. ‘Because senselessness,’ I whispered to myself, ‘is sense at its peak, sense when it can no longer bare itself.’”

—from Fra Keeler by Azaraeen Van der Vliet Oloomi

[tyler-cain]

...[O]ften my thoughts skip like little sparks when a knife is honed and my heart hangs inside me as if it were stuck on a fish-hook, you know, a very thin little hook, and it pierces me so and gives a thin, terribly sharp pain.”

—Milena Jesenská in a letter to Max Brod about her falling out with Kafka.

[tyler-cain]

“He’ll happen to think of something that’ll make something happen, something will happen that’ll make him happen to think of something.” —Fresán in The Invented Part

[itgivesitthew]

“My first perception of Borges is Borges himself. In other words: I see Borges. Let me explain. I must be nine or ten and I’m walking my uncle, who’s in his twenties, along the pedestrian Calle Florida in Buenos Aires. I say that I’m walking my uncle because my uncle is blind. My uncle hoped to become a great painter. During his adolescence he’d won important scholarships and prizes, but he went blind from juvenile diabetes, and at this point – he doesn’t know it, but he senses it – he has two or three or four years left to live. So we’re walking and suddenly someone says, ‘There’s Borges,’ and I look and I see Borges and I say to my uncle, ‘There’s Borges.’ Borges is coming toward us and he, too, is on the arm of a friend or a fan and then my blind uncle – who was the humorous type, wickedly funny – shouts ‘Borges! How are you? You look great.’ And Borges turns his unseeing gaze on the precise spot from which the voice of my blind uncle issues and reaches him and the two of them look at each other without seeing each other, and there I am, in between, unable to believe what I’m seeing.”

— Rodrigo Fresán, from his essay ‘Borges and Me, and Me’

[tyler-cain]

“Lo que hay que resolver es la miseria.” Don Juan Rulfo con esas gafas estupendas