Why do you seem so annoyed at what I'm saying?" "Because we're too much like each other. I loathe your face, which is a caricature of mine, I loathe your voice, which is a mockery of mine, I loathe your pathetic syntax, which is my own.

The web of time - the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect, or ignore each other through the centuries - embraces "every" possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and in yet others both of us exist.

He constructed a vast labyrinthine of periods, made impassable by the piling-up of clauses upon clauses-clauses in which oversight and bad grammar seemed manifestations of disdain.

The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal.

It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.

I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes.

The European and the North American consider that a book that has been awarded any kind of prize must be good; the Argentine allows for the possibility that the book might not be bad, despite the prize.