Ivan Vladislavic Quotes & Sayings

We're left with so little to go on. Only the present is full enough to seem complete, and even that is an optical illusion. The moment is bleeding off the page. We live on the precipice of our perceptions. At the edge of every living instant, the world shears away like a cliff of ice into the sea of what is forgotten. — Ivan Vladislavic

At the end of the month, the doors will close on our little club for the last time. The end of an error. — Ivan Vladislavic

getting lost is not always a bad thing — Ivan Vladislavic

They would beat him and hammer him
and drill him. He bobbed, and ducked, and refused to fall. They struck out, as if they were driving nails into him, and with every blow he felt more like himself — Ivan Vladislavic

Write it down. Not just to remember it, but to forget it in the right way. My notebook are a kind of materialized subconscious, a hard-copy memory and its invisible substrata, following their own rules. More than once I have been surprised to discover that an idea I thought was new and original, something I set down in a notebook yesterday, is already contained in another note from years before. Sometimes the second version repeats the first, almost word for word, across the space of a decade. The earlier version, once brought with clarity to the surface, has been covered over again by layers of yellowing paper. — Ivan Vladislavic

There are no big stories left, just paths through the clutter and the inevitable soft landing. — Ivan Vladislavic