All the Names

I don’t think it’s worth going to talk to him, You’re afraid he’ll start talking about the reasons for the divorce, you don’t want to hear anything bad about her, People on the whole are rarely fair, not to themselves or to other people, and he would more than likely tell me the story so that it looked as if he had been in the right all along, An intelligent analysis, I’m not stupid, No, you’re not, it’s just that you take a long time to understand things, especially simple things, For example, That there was no reason why you should go looking for this woman

there are even those who say that a cemetery like this is a kind of library which contains not books but buried people, it really doesn’t matter, you can learn as much from people as from books

One of the many mysteries of life in the Central Registry, which really would be worth investigating if the matter of Senhor José and the unknown woman had not absorbed all our attention, was how the staff, despite the traffic jams afflicting the city, always managed to arrive at work in the same order, first the clerks, regardless of length of service, then the deputy who opened the door, then the senior clerks, in order of precedence, then the oldest deputy and, finally, the Registrar, who arrives when he has to arrive and does not have to answer to anyone. Anyway, the fact stands recorded.

Contrary to what is generally believed, meaning and sense were never the same thing, meaning shows itself at once, direct, literal, explicit, enclosed in itself, univocal, if you like, while sense cannot stay still, it seethes with second, third and fourth senses, radiating out in different directions that divide and subdivide into branches and branchlets, until they disappear from view, the sense of every word is like a star hurling spring tides out into space, cosmic winds, magnetic perturbations, afflictions.

They didn’t talk much while they were drinking their coffee and nibbling biscuits, just a few words about how quickly cruel time passed, It passes and we don’t even notice, It was morning only a moment ago and now it’s nearly dark, in fact, the afternoon was drawing to a close, but perhaps they were talking about life, about their lives, about life in general, that’s what happens when we listen to a conversation and don’t pay attention, the most important things always escape us. The coffee was finished, the words were finished

Strictly speaking, we do not make decisions, decisions make us

Fame, alas, is a breeze that both comes and goes, it is a weather vane that turns both to the north and to the south, and just as a person might pass from anonymity to celebrity without ever understanding why, it is equally common for that person, after preening himself in the warm public glow, to end up not even knowing his own name