“Conversely, the assumption that things cannot go on like this will one day find itself apprised of the fact that for the suffering of individuals as of communities there is only one limit beyond which things cannot go: annihilation.”
– Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street
[O]n a small scale, there are perhaps paths that lead us again and again to people that have one and the same function for us: passageways that always, in the most diverse periods of life, guide us to the friend, the betrayer, the beloved, the pupil, or the master. - Walter Benjamin, Berlin Chronicle
“And strangely enough: in spite of the fact that Luzhin had read still fewer books in his life than she in hers, had never finished high school, and had been interested in nothing but chess — she felt in him the ghost of a culture that she herself lacked. There were titles of books and names of characters which were for some reason household names to Luzhin, although the books themselves he had never read. His speech was clumsy and full of shapeless, ridiculous words — but in it there sometimes quivered a mysterious intonation hinting at some other kind of words, which were living and charged with meaning but that he could not utter. Despite his ignorance, despite the meagerness of his vocabulary, Luzhin harbored within him a barely perceptible vibration, the shadow of sounds that he had once heard” - Vladimir Nabokov, The Defense
A metamorfose dos pássaros (Catarina Vasconcelos, 2020)
“Tendría que haber en nuestro lenguaje palabras que tengan voz. Espacio libre. Su propria memoria. Palabras que subsisten solas, que lleven el lugar consigo. Un lugar. Su lugar. Su propria materia. Un espacio donde esa palabra suceda igual que un hecho. Como en el lenguaje de ciertos animales, de ciertas aves, de algunos insectos muy antiguos. ¿Pero existe lo que no hay?”
