By Night In Chile/Six Memos for the Next Millenium

Roberto Bolano "By Night in Chile"

"I modestly lowered my eyes, like a wounded fledgeling, and imagined that estate where the critic's path was indeed strewn with roses, where knowing how to read was valued, and where taste was more important than practical necessities and obligations.."

"and in its own way the painting was an altar for human sacrifice, and in its own way the painting was an expression of supreme boredom, and in its own way the painting was an acknowledgement of defeat, not the defeat of Paris or the defeat of European culture bravely determined to burn itself down, not the political defeat of certain ideals the painter tepidly espoused, but his personal defeat, the defeat of an obscure, poor Guatemalan, who had come to the City of Light determined to make his name in its artistic circles, and the way in which the Guatemalan accepted his defeat, with a clear-sightedness reaching far beyond the particular and anecdotal..."

Six Memos for the Next Millenium by Italo Calvino

"This is what Kundera has done with great clarity and immediacy. For Kundera the weight of living consists chiefly in constriction, in the dense net of public and private constrictions that enfolds us more and more closely. His novel shows us how everything we choose and value in life for its lightness soon reveals its true, unbearable weight."

One sentence stories

"When I woke up, the dinosaur was still there."

"For Leopardi, unhappy hedonist that he was, what is unknown is always more attractive thatn what is known; hope and imagination are the only consolations for the disappointments and sorrow of experience."

"I have come to the end of this apologia for the novel as a vast net. Someone might object that the more work tends toward the multiplication of possibilities, the further it departs from what the unicum which is the self of the writer, his inner sincerity and the discovery of his own truth. But I would answer: Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable."