Alessandro Baricco Quotes

Seeing in the air things that the others did not see.

You're never really done for, as long as you've got a good story and someone to tell it to.

First is my name, second those eyes, third a thought, fourth the coming of the night, fifth those mangled bodies, sixth is hunger, seventh is horror, eighth the specters of madness, ninth is meat, and tenth is a man who watches me but does not kill me.

We are full of words whose true meaning we haven't been taught, and one of those words is suffering. Another is the word death. We don't know what they mean, but we use them, and this is a mystery.

Definitive resolutions are made always and only in a state of mind that is not destined to last.

Until the last glimmer of daylight.

In this transparency, the footprints of the little birds spoke with a muffled voice. What they spoke of was entirely without significance, or else something capable of lifting a life off its hinges: there was no way of knowing.

beyond the end of the world

The last light, in the last window, went out. Only the unstoppable machine of the sea still tears away at the silence with the cyclical explosion of nocturnal waves, distant memories of sleepwalking storms and the shipwrecks of dream.

This is the seashore. Neither land nor sea. It's a place that does not exist.

His life fell like rain before his eyes, a quiet spectacle

He wasn't much cut out for serious conversations. And a goodbye is a serious conversation.

He puts down the pen, folds the sheet of paper, and slips it inside an envelope. He stands up, takes from his trunk a mahogany box, lifts the lid, lets the letter fall inside, open and unaddressed. In the box are hundreds of identical envelopes, open and unaddressed. He thinks that somewhere in the world he will meet a woman who has always been his woman. Every now and again he regrets that destiny has been so stubbornly determined to make him wait with such indelicate tenacity, but with time he has learned to consider the matter with great serenity. Almost every day, for years now, he has taken pen in hand to write to her. He has no names or addresses to put on the envelopes: but he has a life to recount. And to whom, if not to her? He thinks that when they meet it will be wonderful to place the mahogany box full of letters on her lap and say to her, 'I was waiting for you.'

"She will open the box and slowly, when she so desires, read the letters one by one. As she works her way back up the interminable thread of blue ink she will gather up the years-- the days, the moments-- that that man, before he ever met her, had already given to her. Or perhaps more simply, she will overturn the box and astonished at that comical snowstorm of letters, she will smile, saying to that man, 'You are mad.' And she will love him forever.

You can't sow without plowing first. First you have to break up the earth.

She had not really a sensitive soul, but to put it in exact terms, was possessed by an uncontrollable feeling of mind

And a while later:
'It is a strange sort of pain.'
Softly.
'To die of yearning for something you'll never experience.

I did not love you out or boredom or loneliness or caprice. I loved you because the desire for you was stronger than any happiness.

It's a strange grief ... to die of nostalgia for something you you will never live.

Do you have children? she asked.
No.
Why?
The man answered that one had to have faith in the world to have children.

There is nothing that can, in the dark become true

Sooner or later you'll have to tell the truth to someone.

As eight years before, he was leaving ... to rewrite his destiny in orderly fashion.

To die of yearning for something you will never experience

He took an unassuming pleasure in his possessions, and the likely prospect of becoming truly wealthy left him completely indifferent. He was, besides, one of those men who like to witness their own life, considering any ambition to live it inappropriate.

It should be noted that these men observe their fate the way most men are accustomed to observe a rainy day.

There are people who die and, with all due respect, you don't lose anything. But he was one of those that when they're gone you feel it. As if the whole world had become, from one day to the next, a little heavier.

He was one of those men who like to be observers at their own lives ... such people observe their destiny much as most people tend to observe a rainy day.

I once knew a man who built a railway all for himself.

When loneliness mastered him he would go up to the cemetery ... The rest of his time was taken up with a liturgy of habits that succeeded in warding off sadness.

Faces change during sex, the features change and it would be a pity not to understand that, because with a man inside, moving on him, you can read his whole life in his face and it's a book that at that moment he can't close.

One needn't be afraid to talk, making love, because the voice we have when we make love is what is most secret in us and the words we are capable of the only shocking, final, total nudity available to us.

Making love is an endless attempt to find a position in which to merge with the other, a position that doesn't exist, but looking for it exists and knowing how to look is an art.

I often thought about him during the war; if only 1900 were here, who knows what he'd do, what he'd say. 'Fuck war' he'd say. But somehow, coming from me, it wasn't the same.

He was, besides, one of those men who like to witness their own life, considering any ambition to live it inappropriate

He fell to the ground like an olive tree, young, beautiful, strong, covered with white blossoms, suddenly shattered by a bolt of lightning in a storm.

As you see, it is not that I don't know my own mind, I know it very well but only up to a certain point in the matter. I know perfectly well what the question is. It's the answer I want.

Sand as far as the eye can see, between the last hills and the sea -- the sea -- in the cold air of an afternoon almost past, and blessed by the wind that always blows from the north.

The beach. And the sea.

It could be perfection -- an image for divine eyes -- a world that happens, that's all, the mute existence of land and water, a work perfectly accomplished, truth --truth -- but once again it is the redeeming grain of a man that jams the mechanism of that paradise, a bagatelle capable on its own of suspending all that great apparatus of inexorable truth, a mere nothing, but one planted in the sand, an imperceptible tear in the surface of that sacred icon, a minuscule exception come to rest on the perfection of that boundless beach. To see him from afar he would be no more than a black dot: amid nothingness, the nothing of a man and a painter's easel. The easel is anchored by slender cords to four stones placed on the sand. It sways imperceptibly in the wind that always blows from the north. The man is wearing waders and a large fisherman's jacket. He is standing, facing the sea, twirling a slim paintbrush between his fingers. On the easel, a canvas.

Only the rustle of those colours waving in the air, impenetrable, lighter than nothingness

It will not have escaped you that this town simulates normality that is completely illusory: every day something happens that one might euphemistically call irritating.

Perhaps sometimes life shows you a side of itself which leaves you with nothing more to say

Reasons get forgotten.

It was surprising to consider that in fact there were signs, that is the embers of a voice destroyed by fire.