Literary Birthday – 30 June – José Emilio Pacheco

José Emilio Pacheco was born 30 June 1939, and died 26 January 2014.

José Emilio Pacheco Quotes

1. The novel since its origins has been the privatisation of history… the history of private life … and in that sense every novel is a historical novel.
2. I am an enemy of the word and the notion of happiness, much of the unhappiness of the world is obsessively pursued.
3. We are all hypocrites. We cannot see ourselves or judge ourselves the way we see and judge others.
4. “I keep thinking
   That poetry is something else:
   A form of love that exists only in silence,
   In a secret place between two people,
   Almost always between two strangers”

José Emilio Pacheco was a Mexican critic, novelist, short-story writer, translator, and poet. Early in his career he created verse that used surrealist and symbolic imagery. He wrote Battles in the Desert & Other Stories. His work was rewarded with the 2009 Cervantes Prize, the highest accolade in Spanish letters.

Source for image: Octavio Nava / Secretaría de Cultura Ciudad de México from México, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

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