“Chang Tzu tells us of a persevering man who after three laborious years mastered the art of dragon-slaying. For the rest of his days, he had not a single opportunity to test his skills.”

“He told me that in 1886 he had invented an original system of numbering and that in a very few days he had gone beyond the twenty-four-thousand mark. He had not written it down, since anything he thought of once would never be lost to him. His first stimulus was, I think, his discomfort at the fact that the famous thirty-three gauchos of Uruguayan history should require two signs and two words, in place of a single word and a single sign. He then applied this absurd principle to the other numbers. In place of seven thousand thirteen he would say (for example) Maximo Pérez; in place of seven thousand fourteen, The Railroad; other numbers were Luis Melián Lafinur, Olimar, sulphur, the reins, the whale, the gas, the caldron, Napoleon, Agustin de Vedia. In place of five hundred, he would say nine. Each word had a particular sign, a kind of mark; the last in the series were very complicated...”

“He had no document but his memory; the training he had acquired with each added hexameter gave him a discipline unsuspected by those who set down and forget temporary, incomplete paragraphs. He was not working for posterity or even for God, whose literary tastes were unknown to him. Meticulously, motionlessly, secretly, he wrought in time his lofty, invisible labyrinth. He worked the third act over twice. He eliminated certain symbols as over-obvious, such as the repeated striking of the clock, the music. Nothing hurried him. He omitted, he condensed, he amplified. In certain instances he came back to the original version. He came to feel affection for the courtyard, the barracks; one of the faces before him modified his conception of Roemerstadt's character. He discovered that the wearying cacophonies that bothered Flaubert so much are mere visual superstitions, weakness and limitation of the written word, not the spoken...He concluded his drama. He had only the problem of a single phrase. He found it. The drop of water slid down his cheek. He opened his mouth in a maddened cry, moved his face, dropped under the quadruple blast.”

“Any life, however long and complicated it may be, actually consists of a single moment — the moment when a man knows forever more who he is.”

“SomeoneA man worn down by time,a man who does not even expect death(the proofs of death are statisticsand everyone runs the riskof being the first immortal),a man who has learned to express thanksfor the days' modest alms:sleep, routine, the taste of water,an unsuspected etymology,a Latin or Saxon verse,the memory of a woman who left himthirty years ago nowwhom he can call to mind without bitterness,a man who is aware that the presentis both future and oblivion,a man who has betrayedand has been betrayed,may feel suddenly, when crossing the street,a mysterious happinessnot coming from the side of hopebut from an ancient innocence,from his own root or from some diffuse god.He knows better than to look at it closely,for there are reasons more terrible than tigerswhich will prove to himthat wretchedness is his duty,but he accepts humblythis felicity, this glimmer.Perhaps in death when the dustis dust, we will be foreverthis undecipherable root,from which will grow forever,serene or horrible,or solitary heaven or hell.”

“What man of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, that he has lost something infinite?”

“The three of them knew it. She was Kafka’s mistress. Kafka had dreamt her. The three of them knew it. He was Kafka’s friend. Kafka had dreamt him. The three of them knew it. The woman said to the friend, Tonight I want you to have me. The three of them knew it. The man replied: If we sin, Kafka will stop dreaming us. One of them knew it. There was no longer anyone on earth. Kafka said to himself Now the two of them have gone, I’m left alone. I’ll stop dreaming myself.”