Cortázar

...no weeping can last forever, widows remarry.

When we dream we give free reign to our aptitude for madness. At the same time we suspect that all madness is a dream that has taken root.
Popular wisdom: The poor guy's crazy, a dreamer ...

You begin to feel what you have always felt, the inexplicable attraction of intellectual suicide by means of the intellect itself. The scorpion stabbing itself in the neck, tired of being a scorpion but having to have recourse to its own scorpionness in order to do away with itself as a scorpion.

Talita slid up on the bed a little and leaned against Traveler. She knew that she was by his side again, that she had not drowned, that he was there holding her up on the surface of the water and that actually there was pity, a marvelous pity. They both felt it at the same moment, and they slid toward each other as if to fall into themselves, into the common earth where words and caresses and mouths enfolded them as a circumference does a circle, those tranquilizing metaphors, that old sadness satisfied with going back to being the same as always, with continuing, keeping afloat against wind and tide, against call and fall.

... it was a little like the look the monsters gave when it occurred to them from time to time to look at each other with a look that was both furtive and total at the same time, secret and much clearer than when they would look at each other for a long time, but a person isn't a monster without good reason ...

You have seen very well that misfortune is, let's say, tangible, perhaps because out of it comes the separation into subject and object. That's why memory is so important, that's why it's so easy to describe catastrophes.

... vacant lots where an old tin can could be used to slit a throat almost as if the two objects were in agreement.

... through which one can out onto an open beach, an extension without limit, the world beneath the eyelids that the eyes turned inward recognized and obeyed.

Now he couldn't drink any more even if he was thirsty.

Talita didn't say anything, but she lifted her upper lip like a festoon and let out a sigh that had its origins in what is called the first signs of sleep.

... he looked into the street where a defenseless open newspaper let itself be read by a starry sky that seemed almost touchable.

In the name of the past we carry out the greatest deceits in the present.

Explanation is a well-dressed mistake.

Finally they would go to bed with latent ill-humor, and spend the whole night dreaming about happy and funny things, which was probably a contradiction of terms.

Perhaps there is a place in man from where the whole of reality can be perceived. This hypothesis seems delirious. Auguste Comte declared that the chemical composition of a star would never be known. The following year Bunsen invented the spectroscope.

And that's why the writer has to set language on fire, put an end to its coagulated forms and even go beyond it, place in doubt the possibility the language is still in touch with what it pretends to name. Not words as such any more, because that's less important, but rather the total structure of language, of discourse.

You're like the salamander, you live in a world of perpetual pyromania.

The ambivalence of the noose, its natural function sabotaged by a mysterious tendency towards neutralization. I think that's what they call entropy.

She had to keep on blinking because the sweat was getting into her eyes. Her tongue felt salty and covered with something that could have been sparks, little stars running back and forth and bumping into her gums and the roof of her mouth.

Words are like us, they're born with one face and what can you do about it.

... his sense of absence and silence was much more than just an extreme recourse, a metaphysical impasse. One day in Jerez de la Frontera I heard a cannon-shot twenty-five yards away and I discovered another meaning of silence. And dogs that can hear a whistle inaudible to us ...

We're all chasing purity, breaking old daubed blisters ...

And so what? Man is the animal who ask.

The original use of words (?). Probably an empty phrase.

Lives which end like literary articles in newspapers and magazines, so pompous on page one and ending up in a skinny tail, back there on page thirty-two, among advertisements for second-hand sales and tubes of toothpaste.

You can feel the night coming on at this hour, even though you can't see it.

He had his book open on his knees and gave the posed impression that he would like to keep on reading.

... brought together without any clash, not juxtaposed or overlapped but merged, and in the effortless removal of contradiction there was the sensation of being where one should be, in the essential place, as when one is a child and has no doubts that the living room will be there for a whole lifetime: an inalienable belonging ... There was another person in the place ... who was silently helping him choose the peaceful spot, the way a person participates in some dreams without even being there, and we take it for granted that the person or thing is there and participates; a force with no visible manifestations, something that is or does through a presence that can do without appearances.

... that aesthetic orders are more a mirror than a passage for metaphysical anxiety.

I loved ... [g]iving testimony, fighting against the nothingness that will sweep us all away. That's how in the air of the soul little things like that will linger, a sparrow that belonged to Lesbia, some blues that in the memory will fill the small space saved for perfumes, stamps, and paperweights.

Like words lost in childhood, heard for the last time by old people who are heading towards death ... The vanity of believing that we understand the works of time: it buries its dead and keeps the keys.