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  • AphorismsFROM Perros en la playa (Dogs on the Beach)
  • Jordi Doce (bio)
    Translated by Steven J. Stewart (bio)

When I don't know where they come from or where they're going, how can I pretend these fragments are mine?

I don't think anything in particular. Hence these statements.

Whatever stalks and harasses you is what defines you.

Some people seem to live with the sole intention of creating a past.

To sum up your remainders, small as they might be. The aphorist's profound vocation.

Those who, like pole-vaulters, use their pen as a pole.

But the beauty of the leap can't disguise the final fall.

I know full well I've disappointed my younger self: all his dreams, his worries, his aspirations—converted into so much compost. But I'd like to see what he would do in my position!

Every return is to somewhere else.

The eye discovers its roundness in a door's peephole. [End Page 149]

Just word games, they tell me with disdain. They wouldn't say that if they knew the rules.

But then I would be the one disdaining myself.

He believes that by seeing what others haven't seen he's already right.

I don't have my own thoughts, just like I don't own the air I breathe. Wherever I am, that's how I breathe, that's how I think.

Above God, a prohibition: that He may not set foot on the earth.

The inefficiency of His servants and envoys. Everything starts to make

more sense.

The immense weariness of creation.

God's stupor upon waking from his long sleep

and reading about everything attributed to him since the world was he world.

Language is like a Gordian knot: All your life wanting to unravel it and then comes death, that sword.

No matter how outside yourself you get, you can never see your whole self.

A stone: a silence that listens to itself.

People talk about ruins not for what they are, but for what they were, though their destruction is the only reason they get talked about.

When we're inside of them, things seem infinite.

A watch is to time as a dictionary is to language.

He rests on his laurels, but in the fetal position.

The best stories demand that we tell them. But they gain strength if we resist a little. [End Page 150]

Time goes by too quickly. We write to stop it, to expand it.

Life is too slow. We read to learn everything our days still haven't shown us.

The motes of foam in the surf—the sea converted into aphorist.

Night. even if just to invent the eyes of a cat.

To think, not in contradictions, but in the spaces opened by contradictions.

I insist, therefore I think.

Something broke so that these fragments could emerge, but what?

To waste time is to multiply it.

It doesn't matter if their reasons aren't real. Their hatred is.

There are many who, after piercing you with their lance, will reproach

you for staining it with your blood.

News, news, news … the worst part of such abundance: we've stopped asking questions.

The strange metamorphosis that converts the goat path of writing into the freeway of reading.

Look for forms of penitence that aren't ostentatious.

Time cures all wounds, perhaps, but at the cost of anesthetizing everything that surrounds us.

We believe we know someone, but it's just the part that corresponds to our presence.

You always exist in the gap left by others.

To tell the truth, in my desert crossings I've found the mirages to be very useful. [End Page 151]

Everything's fleeing to somewhere else. and that place is inside us, and we don't see it.

By definition, any time is better than our present. Not just because we don't live in it, but because it exists in our dreams.

It's not enough to be right. You have to appear not to be.

Those who believe without doubting in the value of their own life.

Those who only value their life if it's converted...

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