Quotes from Claudio Magris

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

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.

De partea cealalt? este locul fericirii, al marii persuasiuni È™i al marelui abandon, al acelui "da" necondiÈ›ionat pe care îl spunem vieÈ›ii, l?sându-ne duÈ™i de valuri sau stând întinÈ™i pe plaj?, în armonie cu existenÈ›a pur? È™i absolut? lipsit? de orice activitate È™i hot?râre, cu lenta È™i vida succesiune a orelor care, probabil, este percepÈ›ia cea mai liber?, intens? È™i ferice a lumii.

A c?l?tori nu pentru a ajunge, ci pentru a c?l?tori, pentru a ajunge cât mai târziu posibil, pentru a nu ajunge, dac? se poate, niciodat?.

Ricordando la disfatta bulgara, evento decisivo per l'esito della 1° guerra mondiale e dunque per la fine di una civiltà, il conte Károlyi scrive che, mentre lo aveva vissuto, non aveva percepito la sua importanza, perché "in quel momento, non era ancora diventato ." P.42

If a man without a woman, as it says in a passage in the Talmud dear to the heart of Kafka, is not a man, then it is Amshel who became a man, even though on the point of death, but it is Franz who narrates this odyssey and teaches us how to become Amshel, how to become a man.

Suleika knows that she is only a passing moment, the crest of a wave or the hem of a cloud, but she is soberly content to be, do an instant, the embodiment of that flow.

Debemos ser capaces —algo extremadamente difícil— de decir no sólo sí o no a una determinada realidad y también a las personas amadas, sino que es necesario continuar amándolas incluso condenando sus acciones y continuar condenando sus acciones aunque sin dejar de amarlas.

La fuerza, la inteligencia, la estupidez, la belleza, la cobardía, la debilidad son situaciones y papeles por los que, antes o después, pasamos todos nosotros. Quien abusa amparándose en la fatalidad de la vida o del propio carácter, una hora o un año después se verá atacado en nombre de las mismas inefables razones. Lo mismo sucede con los pueblos, con sus virtudes, sus caídas y sus apogeos.

Pesimista con la razón, optimista con la voluntad.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Time is not a single train, moving in one direction at a constant speed. Every so often it meets another train coming in the opposite direction, from the past, and for a short while that past is with us, by our side, in our present.

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...

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.

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...

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.