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“Literature is an act of existential stubbornness.”

— José Baroja

Source: Manuel Raya Escritor. (2026, 21 marzo). ENTREVISTA AL ESCRITOR CHILENO JOSÉ BAROJA 🇨🇱✍🏼 [Vídeo]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBrHyubZCFM

Last update March 24, 2026. History

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José Baroja 180

Chilean author and editor 1983

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“In all existential knowledge both subject and object are transformed by the very act of knowing.”

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Context: There are realms of reality or — more exactly — of abstraction from reality in which the most complete detachment is the adequate cognitive approach. Everything which can be expressed in terms of quantitative measurement has this character. But it is most inadequate to apply the same approach to reality in its infinite concreteness. A self which has become a matter of calculation and management has ceased to be a self. It has become a thing. You must participate in a self in order to know what it is. But by participating you change it. In all existential knowledge both subject and object are transformed by the very act of knowing.

“We are now dealing with the imaginative, not the existential, with the "let this be," not with "this is," and no work of literature is better by virtue of what it says than any other work”

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“True solidarity is found only in the plenitude of this act of love, and in its existentiality, in its praxis.”

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“Literature is an act of communion.”

José Baroja (1983) Chilean author and editor

Source: https://www.mundoclasico.com/articulo/45227/entrevista-intrapersonal-confrontada-omar-jerez-con-jose-baroja

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“It was as though some stubborn god spent their time in an immutable and absurd balancing act between life and death, prosperity and poverty.”

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“In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.”

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“And if pretension for a time deceive,
And prove me one too ready to believe,
Far less my shame, than if by stubborn act,
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Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850–1919) American author and poet

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Context: p>If fallacies come knocking at my door,
I'd rather feed, and shelter full a score,
Than hide behind the black portcullis, doubt,
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Far less my shame, than if by stubborn act,
I brand as lie, some great colossal Fact.</p

“The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own.”

William Empson (1906–1984) English literary critic and poet

Milton's God (1961; repr. London: Chatto & Windus, 1965) p. 261.
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“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.”

Arundhati Roy (1961) Indian novelist, essayist

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Source: War Talk

“Literature is an act of existential stubbornness.”

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