42 Quotes by Cesar Aira

A bird flashed across the empty sky. A cart immobile on the horizon, like a midday star. How could a plain like this be remade? Yet someone would, no doubt, attempt to repeat their journey, sooner or later. This thought made them feel they should bet at once very careful and very daring: careful not to make a mistake that would render the repetition impossible; daring, so that the journey would be worth repeating, like an adventure.

The sadness inherent in any memory comes from the fact that its object is forgetting.

A memory is a luminous miniature, like the hologram of the princess, in that movie, that the faithful robot carried in his circuits from galaxy to galaxy. The sadness inherent in any memory comes from the fact that its object is forgetting. All movement, the great horizon, the journey, is a spasm of forgetting, which bends in the bubble of memory. Memory is always portable, it is always in the hands of a wandering automaton.

I was sole keeper and mistress of the impossible. I possessed the keys to pain.

A drove of mules the size of ants appeared in silhouette on a ridgetop path, moving at a star's pace. The mules were driven by human intelligence and commercial interests, expertise in breeding and bloodlines. Everything was human; the farthest wilderness was steeped with sociability.

Each of us is the ultimate expert on the gentleness and understanding we deserve.

Ahora que lo pienso, es bastante asombroso qué pocos secretos guarda la gente. Un par de charlas en un café, y ya están todos revelados. El secreto persiste sólo mientras nadie pregunta.

It was hard to believe that this was a route used virtually throughout the year by travelers, mule drivers and merchants. Anyone in their right mind would have regarded it as a means of suicide. Near the watershed, at an altitude of two thousand meters, amid peaks disappearing into the clouds, rather than a way of getting from point A to point B, the path seemed to have become quite simply a way of departing from all points at once.

La jungla evaporaba todo lo azul, que se escurría como niebla por los volcanes del cielo. El gran anillo negro del horizonte empezaba a dorarse poco a poco, aparecían unas transparencias prematuras, otras que se demoraban arrastrando visiones, otras más, como lupas rosa. Los niños, los únicos que madrugaban tanto como él, ya se estaban zambullendo en las cascadas. Al fin se producía el amanecer, como una red para atrapar monos.