Yoon Kim

😍😍

One of my favorites! 💓

“But you’ve had too much Marcel.” 😂

(from Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor)

“In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. … And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity…”

— Proust, Time Regained (tr. Scott Moncrieff et al.)

“The character of *the reader* is a strange and curious one. While being entirely individual and with his or her own reactions, the reader is so intimately linked with the writer that the truth is that the reader *is* the writer.”

— Clarice Lispector (Feb. 1968)

“Making a book could mean exchanging the ‘void of writing’ for ‘writing the void.’ . . .

Writing is the dawning solitude of the letter.”

— Edmond Jabès

(“Letter from Yukel to Sarah,” The Book of Margins, tr. Waldrop)

Last night 🖤

“A bit of light still filters through the words.”

— Blanchot, L’attente L’oubli

“The pages of the book are doors. Words go through them, driven by their impatience to regroup, to reach the end of the work, to be again transparent.

Ink fixes the memory of words to the paper.
Light is in their absence, which you read.”

— Jabès, The Book of Questions

“There is something divine in books. […] A book is supple, untrammeled. A book is not a crust. It is a ball of light. The filthiest of books, the thickest of books, a ball of light. Pure. Soulful. Divine. Self-abandoning.”

— Henri Michaux, A Certain Plume (tr. Richard Sieburth)

“There is no single self. There are not ten selves. There is no self. SELF is but a point of equilibrium. (One among a thousand others, always possible, always at the ready.) An averaged ‘self,’ a crowd movement. In the name of the many, I sign this book.”

— Henri Michaux

😭😭 💕 🥰

Pascal Quignard (dans le petit traité intitulé “1640”):

“Il faut vivre le présent comme la ruine qu’il prépare. Il faut découvrir le présent comme une ruine dont on recherche le trésor.”

Walter Benjamin:

“If it can be said that for Baudelaire modern life is the reservoir of dialectical images, this implies that he stood in the same relation to modern life as the seventeenth century did to antiquity.”

(from “Central Park,” trans. Jephcott and Eiland)

“To be exiled is not to disappear but to shrink, to slowly or quickly get smaller and smaller until we reach our real height, the true height of the self. […] All literature carries exile within it.”

— Roberto Bolaño

(“Exiles,” Between Parentheses)

“I have a profound respect for humanity. An enormous respect for life. I believe in men. Even the con artists. I try to develop a sense of identification with the rest of humanity. I don’t swim in a pool if I have the sea.”

— Clarice Lispector, Too Much of Life

“The paradox of otherness is that … at no moment in History is it tolerated or possible as such. The other is there only to be reappropriated, recaptured, and destroyed as other.”

— Hélène Cixous, “Sorties” (tr. Betsy Wing)

“But how did I not understand that whatever I can’t reach in me . . . is already other people? Other people, who are our deepest plunge!”

— Lispector, The Apple in the Dark

“The foreigner allows you to be yourself by making a foreigner of you. . . .

The distance that separates us from the foreigner is the very same that separates us from ourselves.”

— Edmond Jabès

(A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Book, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop)

“L’étranger te permet d’être toi-même, en faisant, de toi, un étranger. . . .

La distance qui nous sépare de l’étranger est celle-là même qui nous sépare de nous.”

— Edmond Jabès

(Un Étranger avec, sous le bras, un livre de petit format)

I 🖤chickadees 🪶

“The loveliest creations of men are persistently painful. What would be the description of happiness? Nothing, except what prepares and then what destroys it, can be told. —And now I have told you all that had prepared it.”

— André Gide, The Immoralist (tr. Richard Howard)

😍😍

“Finally, finally, my casing had really broken and without limit I was. Through not being, I was. . . . All shall be within me, if I shall not be; for ‘I’ is just one of the instantaneous spasms of the world.”

— Lispector, The Passion According to G.H. (tr. Idra Novey)

😍😍

“After a certain age our memories are so intertwined with one another that what we are thinking of, the book we are reading, scarcely matters any more. We have put something of ourselves everywhere, everything is fertile, everything is dangerous…”

— Marcel Proust, The Fugitive

“Thinking back to my childhood, I remember others more clearly than myself, but when I think of more recent times, I begin to dominate my memories. I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time.”

— Lyn Hejinian, My Life

“The sky is within a child’s reach. It escapes the adult. […] I would like my writing to ally my childish hand with the sky and my adult hand with the desert.”

(Jabès, The Book of Questions)

For childhood, knowing no preconceived opinions, has none about life. It is as dearly attached (though with just as strong reservations) to the realm of the dead, where it juts into that of the living, as to life itself.”

(“A Berlin Chronicle,” tr. Edmund Jephcott)

Walter Benjamin:

“The obscure awareness of these moments, these places, perhaps more than anything else, confers on childhood memories a quality that makes them at once as evanescent and as alluringly tormenting as half-forgotten dreams. [+]