a past to come - Maurice Blanchot

"All our writing - for everyone and if it were ever writing of everyone - would be this: the anxious search for what was never written in the present, but in a past to come."

‎'drawing is a constant correcting of errors' - John Berger

The Speed of Light - Javier Cercas

p.54 - Everybody looks at reality, but few people see t. The artist isn't the one who makes the invisible visible: that really is romanticism, although not the worst kind, the artist is the one who makes visible what's already visible and everybody looks at and nobody can or nobody knows how or nobody wants to see. Probably nobody wants to see it.

p.83-4 - I already know that perfect happiness does not exist, but here I have learned that perfect happiness doesn't exist either...'

p.98 - On Pascal, no one is entirely saddened by a friend's misfortune. [...] this is mean and false but true. The problem is with the word 'entirely. Since I've been here I've seen several friends die: their death have horrified me, infuriated me, made me cry, but I'd be lying if I said I hadn't felt an obscene relief, for the simple reason that the dead man was not me.

p.214 - But what I most remember about that conversation is the end of it, perhaps because at that moment, for the first time, I had the deceptive intuition that the past is not a stable place but changeable, permanently altered by the future, and that therefore none of what had already happened was irreversible.

p.217 - Treno is now one of those interchangeable cafes that American snobs consider European (from Rome) and European snobs consider consider American (from New York)

p.222- on the wall of fifteen years ago photos of baseball stars had changed, not the picture of John Wayne

p.239 - talked through the night till 'finally dawn surprised them both.'

Last page 278 - 'And how does it end?' he asked. I looked around the almost empty bar and, feeling almost happy, answered: 'It ends like this.'

Soldiers of Salamis - Javier Cercas

p.1 - lame joke about career

p.146 - 'To write novels you don't imagination,' Bolano said. 'Just a memory. Novels are written by combing recollections.'

p. 169 -

'It's different now,' I said. 'He's a successful writer.'

'Really? I'm glad: I always thought he was talented, as well as an out-and-out liar. But I suppose you have to be an out-and-out liar to be a good novelist, don't you?'

The Tenant The Motive - Javier Cercas

p. 94 - About the opposite apartment that is like a reflection, every single item

p. 123 - Reread whole of chapter one or remember
'He knew that a writer recognizes himself as such by his reading. Every writer must be, first and foremost, a reader. He swiftly and efficiently covered the volumes published in the four languages he knew, making use of translations only for access to fundamentals of classical or marginal literatures. However, he distrusted the superstition that all translations were inferior to the original text, because the original was merely the score from which the interpreter executed the work. This - he later observed - did not impoverish the text, but endowed it with an almost infinite number of interpretations or forms, all potentially valid. He believed there was no literature, no matter how lateral or trifling, that did not contain all the elements of Literature, all its magic, all its abysses, all its games. He suspected that reading was an act of informative indolence: the truly literary thing was re-reading. Three or four books contained, as Flaubert believed, all the wisdom to which man had access, but the titles of these books also varied for each man.

Singapore Sling

Singing staring at the dirty water of Singapore River and drinking a drink, named after an island that calls itself a country and a stone age weaponry, recommended by an SPG?

"Cada uno tenía su pasado encerrado dentro de sí mismo, como las hojas de un libro aprendido por ellos de memoria; y sus amigos podían sólo leer el título"

"Each had his past shut in itself, like the leaves of a book they learned by heart, and his friends could only read the title"