If On A Winter's Night A Traveler Quotes
"Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade."
"The ideal position for reading is something you can never find."
"We can rediscover the continuity of time only in the novels of that period when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded."
"You’re the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything."
"You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst."
"The pleasures derived from the use of a paper knife are tactile, auditory, visual, and especially mental."
"The secret [of not reading] is not refusing to look at the written words."
"I am becoming convinced that the world wants to tell me something, send me messages, signals, warnings."
"It is a rainy evening; the man enters the bar; he unbuttons his damp overcoat; a cloud of steam enfolds him."
"I had been seeking to tear something from my past so as not to leave it to my rival."
"The sea urchin, the little veil, the two strangers: the color black continues to appear to me in circumstances bound to attract my attention, messages that I interpret as a summons from the night."
"Every evening I spend the first hours of darkness penning these pages, which I do not know if anyone will ever read."
"The fact is that I find in the day’s light, in this diffused, pale, almost shadowless luminosity, a darkness deeper than the night’s."
"To be able to draw this object at my leisure from every point of view, I should have one that I could keep with me and become familiar with."
"Books are the steps of the threshold. All books continue in the beyond."
"Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be."
"The truth is that we were all very young, too young for everything we were experiencing."
"You can’t change your past any more than you can change your name."
"It was all very well for me to say each time: What a relief, I’ll turn the mileage back to zero, I’ll erase the blackboard."
"Now you understand Ludmilla’s refusal to come with you; you are gripped by the fear of having also passed over to 'the other side' and of having lost that privileged relationship with books which is peculiar to the reader: the ability to consider"
"Since I have become a slave laborer of writing, the pleasure of reading has finished for me."
"The only truth I can write is that of the instant I am living."
"If an individual truth is the only one that a book can contain, I might as well accept it and write my truth."
"The romantic fascination produced by the first sentences of the first chapter of many novels is soon lost in the continuation of the story."
"I have no longer been able to end a page. I must take this damned Snoopy down from the wall as quickly as possible."
"It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible."
"The quality of perennial dissatisfaction seems to me characteristic of Ludmilla."
"In any case, here, now that you see me, I hope you haven’t been disappointed. Do I correspond to the image you had formed of Silas Flannery?"
"Only the ability to be read by a given individual proves that what is written shares in the power of writing."
"The old man raised his red eyelids, gnarled as a turkey’s."
"In this palace all the doors served only for leaving and never for entering."
"Now the images try to reoccupy these voids but achieve nothing except to assume also the hue of dreams forgotten the instant they appear."
"Eat, son, you’ve been traveling sixteen years finding your way home."
"From him nothing but evil came to the Indian people."
"Eyes that, like those of children, look at an eternal present without forgiveness."
"If we do not love foreigners we have our reasons."
"The breath of the Spirit does not require a great audience to reveal itself; it flourishes in the shadow."
"The whole universe is in a transitional phase."
"This nature business is another fine fraud: kill it!"
"The world is reduced to a sheet of paper on which nothing can be written except abstract words."
"Turn off your light, too. Aren’t you tired of reading?"