Quotes from César Aira

A reader of mine is a deluxe reader, not because I'm so great but because in order to get to me you have to take a path through literature, not through some books bought out of curiosity at the bookstore. A reader of mine has to have read other things.

Each of us is the ultimate expert on the gentleness and understanding we deserve.

Forgetting is like a great alchemy free of secrets, limpid, transforming everything to the present. In the end it makes our lives into this visible and tangible thing we hold in our hands, with no folds left hidden in the past.

Changing the subject is one of the most difficult arts to master, the key to almost all the others.

Everything is made of words, and the words had done their job. I could even say they had done it well. They had risen in a confusing swarm and spun around in spirals, ever higher, colliding and separating, golden insects, messengers of friendship and knowledge, higher, higher, into that region of the sky where the day turns into night and reality into dreams, regal words on their nuptial flight, always higher, until their marriage is finally consummated at the summit of the world.

I'm following it perfectly. Although, if this were a novel, I'd take the trouble to reread the last paragraph as carefully as possible.

every mind is shaped by its own experiences and memories and knowledge, and what makes it unique is the grand total and extremely personal nature of the collection of all the data that have made it what it is. Each person possesses a mind with powers that are, whether great or small, always unique, powers that belong to them alone. This renders them capable of carrying out a feat, whether grandiose or banal, that only they could have carried out.

Every morning, and every night, I resolved to start a new life, but I always procrastinated, acquiescing to my ailing willpower. And Saturday at eleven o'clock at night was not the right moment to make important decisions.

He had developed a superstitious fear of the instant, that tiny hole through which all the time available to human beings must pass.

Everyone likes ice cream, he said, white with rage. The mask of patience was slipping, and I don't know how I managed to hold back my tears. Everyone except you, son, because you're a moron.

O era contradictorio, o había que redefinir el término improvisación. Siempre se piensa que improvisar es actuar sin pensar. Pero si uno hace una cosa por un impulso, o porque le da la gana, o directamente sin saber por qué, de todas maneras es uno el que la hace, y uno tiene una historia que lo ha llevado a ese punto de su vida; y entonces, lejos de no haber pensado ese acto, no podría haberlo pensado más: lo ha estado pensando cada minuto desde que nació.

I had a real life completely separate from beliefs, from the common reality made up of shared beliefs...

I was sole keeper and mistress of the impossible. I possessed the keys to pain.

Each instant was different and new and unrepeatable. That was the very nature of time, ceaselessly realizing itself, in every life.

This was one of those situations in which the whole is not enough. Perhaps because there were other wholes, or because the whole made up by the speaker and his personal world rotates like a planet, and the combined effect of rotation and orbital movement is to keep certain sides of certain planets permanently hidden.

Poison or elixir, narcotic or aphrodisiac, whatever it was, this flower, relic of a day in the life of an accidental writer, an inadvertent counterfeiter leaving his traces in code, the birds were coming to try it, performing a dance for no one and flying up toward the moon.

The voice, for its part, has the peculiarity that when released it carries the weight of the body from which it has come; since that weight is erotic reality, lovers believe they can embrace words of love, they believe they can make them into a continuum of love that will last forever.

A certain peace had come over me. I was discovering that time, long-term time made of days, weeks and months, and not of horrific moments as before, was operating in my favor. Nothing else was, but that didn't worry me. Time was enough. I clung on to time, and consequently to learning, the only human activity that makes time our ally.

So familiar that it didn't even register in the conversation; but it did reappear when I laid it out on the table of my dreams.

I was almost unimaginably vague, not because I was stupid, but because nothing really mattered to me. This is an enormous paradox, because everything mattered to me, far too much; I made a mountain out of every molehill, and that was my main problem... I might have seemed indifferent, but nothing could have been further from the truth and I knew it.

Were the "pampas," perhaps, flatter than the land they were crossing? He doubted it; what could be flatter than a horizontal plane?

A few birds flew out from the mountains and glided for a while without sound. Standing out against the sky on high slopes beyond a range of low hills, they saw an endless herd of deer, rendered mute by distance. The landscape was reminiscent of a cardboard cutout, but on a huge scale, which gave the impression they were the ones who had become miniatures…All three of them were equally lost.

The strangeness that made everything sparkle came from me. Worlds rose out of my bottomless perplexity

I don't know who explained this rule to me; maybe it was the product of my own speculations and fantasies. That would have been typical: I was always inventing stories and machinations to make sense of things I didn't understand, and I understood almost nothing.