Yoon Kim Book Recommendations & Book Mentions

Yoon Kim

“Why am I so afraid sometimes? And why, when I’m most afraid, does my spirit seem to surge, rise up, and observe the whole planet from above?” — Roberto Bolaño, The Third Reich

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Yoon Kim

Nevertheless, his whole face exudes a strange, almost vehement sense of hope, and that is why he could also be an inventor.” — Javier Marías from “Perfect Artists” (on what his collection of postcards of portraits can tell us about writers), in Written Lives

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Yoon Kim

“. . . I am like an atom A Nothing left in darkness yet I am an identity I wish & feel & weep & groan Ah terrible terrible” — from Blake’s The Four Zoas (quoted in Kenzaburō Ōe, Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!)

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Yoon Kim

“In poetry, technique is another name for morality . . . The false poet speaks of himself, almost invariably in the name of others. The true poet speaks with others when he talks to himself.” — Octavio Paz, Alternating Current

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Yoon Kim

Nabokov: “I think that what I would welcome at the close of a book of mine is a sensation of its world receding in the distance and stopping somewhere there, suspended afar like a picture in a picture: The Artist’s Studio by Van Bock.” (from Strong Opinions)

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Yoon Kim

Georges Perec (“Some of the Things I Really Must Do Before I Die”): 3 Arrange my bookshelves once and for all 12 To have an ‘out-of-time’ experience (like [Jeanloup Sieff]) 22 I’d like to have the time to read Henry James (among others) 29 Write for very young children

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Yoon Kim

“The story of my life doesn’t exist. Does not exist. There’s never any centre to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it’s not true, there was no one.” — Marguerite Duras, The Lover

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Yoon Kim

Witold Gombrowicz in his Diary: “The most important, most extreme, and most incurable dispute is that waged in us by two of our most basic strivings: the one that desires form, shape, definition and the other, which protests against shape, and does not want form. [+]

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Yoon Kim

“By his own standards he was simply looking for something. He wanted to see the world, that was all. He wanted to know and love the entire atlas.” William T. Vollmann, “The Atlas”

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Yoon Kim

“It was the end of the text, but a provisional end. The next morning the dialogue with the new being began again, a silent dialogue of glances, caresses, absences, thoughts, smiles, and fear.” — Maria Gabriela Llansol, The Geography of Rebels

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