I don’t know who explained this rule to me; maybe it was the product of my own speculations and fantasies. That would have been typical: I was always inventing stories and machinations to make sense of things I didn’t understand, and I understood almost nothing.

There is something dreamlike about the points that provide a view of the other side, but they belong not so much to the dreamtime as to dream work. The nomads enter the dreamtime not by setting off on some extraordinary, dangerous voyage, but through their everyday, ambulatory movement.

The greatness and efficacy of a magician is measured by his refusal to use magic. The true magician, the greatest, is the poorest and most unfortunate of all mortals. Because between his magic and his person forgetfulness takes shape, in the form of the world.

Changing the subject is one of the most difficult arts to master, the key to almost all the others.

Being a vanguardist has always meant, and will always mean, to not accept that the good is good and the bad is bad, and invent a new definition of what’s good and bad.

The true vanguardist is unnaceptable, infamous and illegible.

(...) Ante la burocracia somos todos extranjeros, (...) la burocracia es, en esencia (y en eso radica su utilidad), un código ajeno.

O pátio [da prisão] era cercado de entradas e saídas. Não dava a impressão de hermetismo, como se deveria esperar. É inevitável que se tenha uma ideia romântica de uma prisão, embora, como era o meu caso, não soubesse o que era o romantismo. Nem uma prisão, para ser sincera. Esta passava uma sensação de realismo exacerbada e destruidora; as ideias prévias, embora não as tivesse, ruíam.

Delia Siffoni já era louca, e o desaparecimento de seu filho único a deixou louca. Entrou num frenesi. Espetáculo prodigioso, cartão-postal perene, cinema transcendental, cena das cenas: ver uma louca ficar louca. É como ver Deus.[...]

A few birds flew out from the mountains and glided for a while without sound. Standing out against the sky on high slopes beyond a range of low hills, they saw an endless herd of deer, rendered mute by distance. The landscape was reminiscent of a cardboard cutout, but on a huge scale, which gave the impression they were the ones who had become miniatures…All three of them were equally lost.