Cesar Aira Quotes

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.

Impunity: it's always impunity that gets you dancing. What did I care about
being ridiculous? I was on my way to earning a superior kind of impunity, and
nobody knew it.

Every morning, and every night, I resolved to start a new life, but I always procrastinated, acquiescing to my ailing willpower. And Saturday at eleven o'clock at night was not the right moment to make important decisions.

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.

But the Australians, what do the Australians do? How do they structure their landscape? For a start they postulate a primal builder, whose work they presume only to interpret: the mythical animal who was active in the "dreamtime," that is, a primal era, beyond verification, as the name indicates. A time of sleep. The visible landscape is an effect of causes that are to be found in the dreamtime. For example, the snake that dragged itself over this plain creating these undulations, etc., etc. These.. curious Aborigines make sure their eyes are closed while events take place, which allows them to see places as records of events. But what they see is a kind of dream, and they wake into a reverie, since the real story (the snake, not the hills) happened while they were asleep.

I had a real life completely separate from beliefs, from the common reality made up of shared beliefs ...

Were the "pampas," perhaps, flatter than the land they were crossing? He doubted it; what could be flatter than a horizontal plane?

I have not the least sympathy for these useless and destructive pastimes, football and politics.

A reader of mine is a deluxe reader, not because I'm so great but because in order to get to me you have to take a path through literature, not through some books bought out of curiosity at the bookstore. A reader of mine has to have read other things.

Everything is made of words, and the words had done their job. I could even say they had done it well. They had risen in a confusing swarm and spun around in spirals, ever higher, colliding and separating, golden insects, messengers of friendship and knowledge, higher, higher, into that region of the sky where the day turns into night and reality into dreams, regal words on their nuptial flight, always higher, until their marriage is finally consummated at the summit of the world.

It was one of those cases in which the real is irreplaceable and not representable. Unfortunately for them, the real was also instantaneous and without future.

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.

Everyone likes ice cream," he said, white with rage. The mask of patience was slipping, and I don't know how I managed to hold back my tears. "Everyone except you, son, because you're a moron.

Why is it that drama always starts late? Whereas comedy always seems to have started already.

Like in a dream, everything seemed to be on the point of vanishing but at the same time ablaze with persistent reality.

I'm following it perfectly. Although, if this were a novel, I'd take the trouble to reread the last paragraph as carefully as possible.

I was almost unimaginably vague, not because I was stupid, but because nothing really mattered to me. This is an enormous paradox, because everything mattered to me, far too much; I made a mountain out of every molehill, and that was my main problem... I might have seemed indifferent, but nothing could have been further from the truth and I knew it.

Poison or elixir, narcotic or aphrodisiac, whatever it was, this flower, relic of a day in the life of an accidental writer, an inadvertent counterfeiter leaving his traces in code, the birds were coming to try it, performing a dance for no one and flying up toward the moon.

He couldn't believe that sleep had robbed him of this spectacle night after night. Such are the writer's privileges, he thought, nostalgic already for the present.

At this stage of my life, I had reached the conclusion that I would never be the protagonist of any story. The only thing I could hope for was to make an appearance in somebody else's.

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

Her tone spoke less of nostalgia than reproach, of feelings long coveted and repeated whenever she had the chance.

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 clung on to time, and consequently to learning, the only human activity that makes time our ally.

This was one of those situations in which the whole is not enough. Perhaps because there were other "wholes," or because the "whole" made up by the speaker and his personal world rotates like a planet, and the combined effect of rotation and orbital movement is to keep certain sides of certain planets permanently hidden.

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

... every mind is shaped by its own experiences and memories and knowledge, and what makes it unique is the grand total and extremely personal nature of the collection of all the data that have made it what it is. Each person possesses a mind with powers that are, whether great or small, always unique, powers that belong to them alone. This renders them capable of carrying out a feat, whether grandiose or banal, that only they could have carried out.

She belonged to the common type: without ever really thinking it over in detail, she had considered herself a woman like the rest, with no reason for anything to happen to her that didn't also happen to all other women. It was as if this sort of thing happened to someone else, to an absolute someone else, which is to say, as if it didn't happen to anyone.

The strangeness that made everything sparkle came from me. Worlds rose out of my bottomless perplexity