Leaving The Atocha Station Quotes
"The closest I’d come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity."
"I had long worried that I was incapable of having a profound experience of art and I had trouble believing that anyone had, at least anyone I knew."
"Each moment could draw upon the future poem as a fund; my notebook, not my fragmentary Spanish, would become the sign of the virtual, enabling my project to advance."
"I was intensely suspicious of people who claimed a poem or painting or piece of music 'changed their life,' especially since I had often known these people before and after their experience and could register no change."
"Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf."
"I could feel the initial creep of panic, and as I reached around in my bag for a yellow tranquilizer, I encountered one of my notebooks, which I took out."
"I didn’t understand the extremity of her concern. 'You’d like my mom,' I said to get further away from the feminist thing, 'but she’s not so rich.'"
"I tried hard to imagine my poems or any poems as machines that could make things happen, changing the government or the economy or even their language, the body or its sensorium, but I could not imagine this, could not even imagine imagining it."
"I realized that, in such a world, I would swallow a bottle of white pills."
"But to have 'killed' my mother, the 'feminist,' for whatever reason, revealed me to be at heart a right-wing, jackbooted misogynist, and further called into question the legitimacy of my research."
"I am scared ... I was trying to imagine ..."
"You can be whatever you want to people."
"But then the reality returns. And I have constant terror."
"The particular texture of my loneliness derived in part from my sense that I could only share it, could only describe it, as pure transition, a slow dissolve between scenes."
"Happy were the ages when the starry sky was the map of all possible paths."
"The relationship I might have had in the flattering light of the subjunctive."
"It's difficult to express myself with subtlety in Spanish."
"People were chanting that it wasn’t raining, that Madrid was crying."
"By speaking, by thinking, we undertake to clarify things, and that forces us to exacerbate them, dislocate them, schematize them. Every concept is in itself an exaggeration."
"No writer is free to renounce his political moment, but literature reflects politics more than it affects it, an important distinction."
"For whatever reason, I wasn’t nervous. Maybe Elena López Portillo would attend and write an essay on my work. Maybe Isabel would bring Oscar, whom I imagined as Carlos. Teresa said her publisher was considering asking me for a book."
"Teresa should read the originals; I’ll read the translations. My accent, when I read, was good, much better, I didn’t know why, than when I spoke."