Claudio Magris

“Sabías que la poesía no es jamás sólo tuya, como el amor, sino de todos; no es el poeta el que crea las palabras, decías y declamabas, es la palabra la que se le hecha encima y le hace poeta...”

“Siempre te ha gustado escribir, no importaba el qué, escribir y ya está; es el gesto lo que cuenta, gesto de poeta, gesto de rey, soberano albedrío sobre las pobres vocales y consonantes que aparecena tus órdenes y se ponen en fila, march en, alienación derech, rompan filas.”

“...al corazón no se le dan órdenes, decía, el corazón se rompe, y si se le dice que no se rompa se rompe igualmente, como el mío...”

“Speaking of the capitulation of Bulgaria, an event decisive to the outcome of the First World War and therefore to the end of a civilisation, Count Karolyi writes that while he was living through it he did not realise its importance, because "at that moment, 'that moment' had not yet become 'that moment'". The same is true in fiction for Fabrizio del Dongo, concerning the battle of Waterloo: while he is fighting it, it does not exist. In the pure present, the only dimension, however, in which we live, there is no history. At no single instant is there such a thing as the Fascist period or the October revolution, because in that fraction of a second there is only the mouth swallowing saliva, the movement of a hand, a glance at the window. ”

“True poetry ought to be secret and clandestine, concealed like a prohibited voice of dissent, while at the same time it should speak to everyone.”

“Judge not,' it has been said, but being a juryman can be a pleasant occupation when one is not weighing up human actions and years in prison, but the books or the wines of the season.”

“He [Mihaly Babits] hoped that some god might offer a bed to the river of words which rose to his lips, so that it might flow between ordered banks to the sea, there to vanish.”

“The courage to put an end to war, to see the abysmal stupidity of it, is certainly no less than that needed to start one.”

“History shows that it is not only senseless and cruel, but also difficult to state who is a foreigner.”

“The Danube is not blue, as Karl Isidore Beck calls it in the lines which suggested to Strauss the fetching, mendacious title of his waltz. The Danube is blond, 'a szöke Duna', as the Hungarians say, but even that 'blond' is a Magyar gallantry, or a French one, since in 1904 Gaston Lavergnolle called it Le Beau Danube blond. More down to earth, Jules Verne thought of entitling a novel Le Beau Danube jaune. Muddy yellow is the water that grows murky at the bottom of these [the Strudlhof] steps.”

“Great poetry is capable of dealing with erotic passion, but it has to be the very greatest to represent that deeper and more tortuous love -- more rooted, more absolute -- which we devote to our children, and which it is so hard to talk about.”

“The great commander knows that in order to win one needs to know the remote and also the immediate reasons for the war, the capacities of the soldiers, which is to say the social and political make-up of the states, determining the variety, the quality and the character of the men.”

“The great commander can certainly move fast and strike like lightning, but his art of war consists first and foremost in moderation, measured geometric order, carefully weighed-up knowledge of circumstances and rules, a tranquil 'thinking things over'; without this there is little use in being acquainted with that 'infinity of situations' in which a soldier finds himself.”

“[E]very journey is played out between standstill and flight.”

“Conviction, as Michelstaedter wrote, is the present possession of one's own life and one's own person, the ability to live each moment to the full, not goading oneself madly into burning it up fast and using it with a view to an all too imminent future, thus destroying it in the hope that life -- the whole of life -- may pass swiftly.”

“It is comforting that travel should have an architecture, and that it is possible to contribute a few stones to it, although the traveller is less like one who constructs landscapes -- for that is a sedentary task -- than like one who destroys them. . . . But even destruction is a form of architecture, a deconstruction that follows certain rules and calculations, an art of disassembling and reassembling, or of creating another and different order.”

“There are many hostelries in his report, which is the true account of an expedition.”

“To use the term 'clerk' as an insult is simply a banal vulgarity; Pessoa and Svevo, however would have welcomed it as a just attribute of the poet. The latter does not resemble Achilles or Diomedes, ranting on their war-chariots, but is more like Ulysses, who knows that he is no one. He manifests himself in this revelation of impersonality that conceals him in the prolixity of things, as travelling erases the traveller in the confused murmur of the street.”