Antonio Tabucchi Quotes

Like a blazing comet, I've traversed infinite nights, interstellar spaces of the imagination, voluptuousness and fear.

Subconsciously, Islam took over me, so it was like eighty or ninety percent of the fabric of the person I was.

Our ego seeks to understand everything. It wants all the answers. Part of what destroys the ego and connects us with the light is doing things that absolutely don't make any sense. If we want something beyond logic, like a miracle, we have to do something that is beyond logic.

Away! Away! The spell of arms and voices: the white arms of roads, their promise of close embraces and the black arms of tall ships that stand against the moon, their tale of distant nations. They are held out to say: We are alone. Come. And the voices say with them: We are your kinsmen. And the air is thick with their company as they call to me, their kinsman, making ready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth... Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

Dreaming is to think by moonlight by the light of an inner moon.

In the creative state a man is taken out of himself.

It is a totally different creativity I am talking about. A Taj Mahal... just watching it on a full moon night, and great meditation is bound to arise in you. Or the temples of Khajuraho, Konarak, Puri - just meditating on them and you will be surprised that all your sexuality is transformed into love. They are miracles of creativity. They were not created by pathological people, they were created by those who had attained.

the year she had run fleetly through the dewy grass under the moon- the night of wine, when dreams condensed out of thin air like the nightmilk of fantasy.

I am convinced that there is no great distance between heaven and earth, that the distance lies in our finite minds. When the Beloved visits us in the night, He turns our chambers into the vestibules of His palace halls. Earth rises to heaven when heaven comes down to earth.

Love, like the opening of the heavens to the Saints, shows for a moment, even to the dullest man, the possibilities of the human race. He has faith, hope, and charity for another being, perhaps but a creation of his imagination: still it is a great advance for a man to be profoundly loving even in his imaginations.

When you dance, do you feel desire? Do you feel as if you were summoning up a greater energy? When you dance, are there moments when you cease to be yourself?

I think writing, my writing, is a species of mediumship. I become the person.

Deprived of human intercourse, I inevitably overvalue the imagination and expect it to make the mundane glow with an aura of self-transcendence. Yet why these glorious sunsets, I ask myself, if nature does not speak to us with tongues of fire.

If you wish to shine like day, burn up the night of self-existence. Dissolve in the Being who is everything.

On a night without moon or stars you can't see a thing, but you can imagine anything.

To be in love is to surpass one's self.

A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then leave.

For I could not read or speak and on the long nights I could not turn the moon off or count the lights of cars across the ceiling.

Let my soul, a shining tree, Silver branches lift towards thee, Where on a hallowed winter's night The clear-eyed angels may alight.

When the night has come and the land is dark and the moon is the only light we see. No, I won't be afraid, no, I won't be afraid, just as long as you stand, stand by me.

Sometimes when I sleep at night I think of (Dr. Seuss's) 'Hop on Pop.'

If this were a made-up story, it would begin at night, with a storm blowing and owls hooting and rattling noises under the bed.

One of the great functions of art is to help us imagine what it is like to be not ourselves, what it is like to be someone or something else, what it is like to live in another skin, what it is like to live in another body, and in that sense to surpass ourselves, to go out beyond ourselves.

How much more beautiful is the moon, Slanting down the gauffered branches of a plum-tree; The moon Wavering across a bed of tulips; The moon, Still, Upon your face. You shine, Beloved, You and the moon. But which is the reflection?

The man, who has seen the rising moon break out of the clouds at midnight, has been present like an archangel at the creation of light and of the world.