"If On a Winter's Night a Traveller"

[fiefoe]

Even Italo Calvino can't charm me into liking conspiracy plots.

• but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered.
• 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, a period that lasted no more than a hundred years.
• The novel begins in a railway station, a locomotive huffs, steam from a piston covers the opening of the chapter, a cloud of smoke hides part of the first paragraph.
• .. to move backward over the cemetery of spent hours, lying lifeless in their circular pantheon. But who can say that the clock's numbers aren't peeping from rectangular windows, where I see every minute fall on my with a click like the blade of a guillotine?
• Perhaps this is why the author piles supposition on supposition in long paragraphs without dialogue, a thick, opaque layer of lead where I may pass unnoticed, disappear.
• I can't imagine a life all made up of minimal alternatives, carefully circumscribed, on which bets can be made: either this or that.
• a real life experience, always elusive, discontinuous, debated.
• the sense of concreteness that you perceived from the very first lines bears in it also the sense of loss, the vertigo of dissolution
• but which I feel pressing against me and which is only the alienness of the other, as if that other had already taken my place and any other place, and I were erased from the world.
• it is my relationship with my life, consisting of things never concluded and half erased,
• this girl's application in drawing seashells denotes in her a search for formal perfection which the world can and therefore must attain
• a natural inclination does truly lead me to recognize my moods in the motionless suffering of things
• an inner afflatus always on the verge of being dispersed at contact with the air, the echo of a vanished knowledge revealed in the penumbra and in tacit allusions. <>
• all interpretation is a use of violence and caprice against a text
• (his eyes scoured the page like a fish's eyes scouring the seabed, but also like the eyes of an aquarium visitor as he follows a fish's movements in an illuminated tank.)
• the mournful patience of overnervous people and the ultrasonic nervousness of overpatient people
• that privileged relationship with books which is peculiar to the reader: the ability to consider what is written as something finished and definitive
• you are possessive toward yourself, that you are attached to the signs in which you identify something of yourself, fearing to be lost with them.
• its speculative capacity. (The adjective here assumes all its meanings: I am at once a man who thinks and a businessman, and a collector of optical instruments as well.)
• the enameled gardens jumbled at the bottom of a well (kaleidoscope)
• How well I would write if I were not here!
• The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say, "I read, therefore it writes."
• I, too, would like to erase myself and find for each book another I, another voice, another name, to be reborn
• .. faced the world of outsiders with it as if taking refuge behind the shield of an unripened and elusive bliss.
• a new discovery among the folds of the sentences.
• The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.