“I deny the fact that when I kill time, time is actually killing me”

“Let me be the first to say that I know the name for everything and if I don’t I’ll make them up: dukkha, naufragio, talinhaga. Just like the young whose hearts give no shame, I love the excesses of beauty, there is never enough sunlight in the world I will live in, never enough room for love.I fear none of us will last long enough to prove what I’ve always suspected, that the sky is a membrane in an angel’s skull, trees talk to each other at night, ice is water in a state of silence, the embryo listens to everything we say.I am afraid for the child skipping rope on the corner of my street, the girl on the train with flowers in her hair, the man whose memory is entirely in Spanish. I am more afraid of losing consciousness when I go to sleep, or that in my sleep I will grow old and forget how desire once drove me mad with wakefulness.Just like the perfect seasons they will die and I will die and you will die also; no one knows who will go first, and this is the source of all my grief.”

“I love the excesses of beauty,there is never enough sunlightin the world I will live in,never enough room for love.”

“The monsoon came, six monthsof infinite rain. The towns I once knewwere wiped clean,and everyone said it was Godrevising his poem.”

“Because you brand our tongueswith silence. Because you watch usin fear, even while we sing.”

“Then she decided she was ready to die.But before she did, she asked the poets to record these momentsin song, and the architects to carve the song in marble,and the marble to be extracted from the most secret veinsof the earth and placed where no man could see it,because that is the nature of love, because one walks alonethrough the ruins of the heart, because the young must sleepwith their eyes open, because the angels tremblefrom so much beauty, because memory moves in orbitsof absence, because she holds her hands out in the rain,and rain remembers nothing, not even how it became itself.”

“A further reason for my hatred of . . . ideologies is quite a primitive one. I have an aversion to killing people for the fun of it. What the fun is, I did not quite understand at the time, but in the intervening years the ample exploration of revolutionary consciousness has cast some light on this matter. The fun consists in gaining a pseudo-identity through asserting one's power, optimally by killing somebody—a pseudo-identity that serves as a substitute for the human self that has been lost. . . . A good example of the type of self that has to kill other people in order to regain in an Ersatzform what it has lost is the famous Saint-Juste, who says that Brutus either has to kill other people or kill himself.. . . . I have no sympathy whatsoever with such characters and have never hesitated to characterize them as "murderous swine.”