Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that’s beautiful.
You can’t measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange.
He suddenly recalled from Plato’s Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
Oh lovers! be careful in those dangerous first days! once you’ve brought breakfast in bed you’ll have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal.
Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.
Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.
…because love is continual interrogation. I don’t know of a better definition of love.
Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.
The longing for Paradise is man’s longing not to be man.
What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating.
If excitement is a mechanism our Creator uses for His own amusement, love is something that belongs to us alone and enables us to flee the Creator. Love is our freedom. Love lies beyond “Es Muss sein!
(God) being the old man invented in order to, and with whom to, hold long conversations.
Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.
Yes, it’s a well-known fact about you: you’re like death, you take everything.
Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case; animals have the right to a merciful death.
When graves are covered with stones, the dead can no longer get out. But the dead can’t go out anyway! What difference does it make whether they’re covered with soil or stones?
The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented.
But isn’t it true that an author can write only about himself?
For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?
She was aware that in love even the most passionate idealism will not rid the body’s surface of its terrible, basic importance.
So she stood naked in front of the young man and at this moment stopped playing the game.
Children, Never look Back!” and this meant that we must never allow the future to be weighed down by memory . for children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles.
The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting.
Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.
Unlike the puerile loyalty to a conviction, loyalty to a friend is a virtue – perhaps the only virtue, the last remaining one.
Today I know this: when it comes time to take stock, the most painful wound is that of broken friendships; and there is nothing more foolish than to sacrifice a friendship to politics.
Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.This is the obscenity of war: the intimacy of mutually shed blood, the lascivious proximity of two soldiers who, eye to eye, bayonet each other.
To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.
Fortunately women have the miraculous ability to change the meaning of their actions after the event.
For he was aware of the great secret of life: Women don’t look for handsome men. Women look for men who have had beautiful women. Having an ugly mistress is therefore a fatal mistake.
It was futile to attack with reason the stout wall of irrational feelings that, as is known, is the stuff of which the female mind is made.
The man raised his glass, ‘To you!’Can’t you think of a wittier t
Not only have people stopped trying to be attractive when they are out among other people, but they are no longer even trying not to look ugly!
Art must always stand guard against stirring emotions that lie outside the aesthetic: sexual arousal, terror, disgust, shock.
Fortunately, I read (the books) without knowing what I was in for, and the best thing that can ever happen to a reader happened to me: I loved something that, by conviction (or by my nature) I should not have loved
It takes a very great intelligence to breathe logical meaning into meaningless ideas.
I say, indeed: “consolation in the nonsentience of nature.” For nonsentience is consoling; the world of nonsentience is the world outside human life; it is eternity; “it is the sea gone off with the sun” (Rimbaud).
Dogs are our link to paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring–it was peace.
When his wife was at his side, she was also in front of him, marking out the horizon of his life. Now the horizon is empty: the view has changed.
Revolution in Love’. Can you tell me what you mean by that? Do you want free love as against bourgeois marriage, or monogamy as against bourgeois promiscuity?
Of course, these were only dreams. How could a sensible woman leave a happy marriage? All the same, a seductive voice from afar kept breaking into her conjugal peace: it was the voice of solitude.
The history of music is mortal, but the idiocy of the guitar is eternal.
When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.
She admired her passion, knowing that passion is by definition excessive.
Between the approximation of the idea and the precision of reality there was a small gap of the unimaginable, and it was this hiatus that gave him no rest.
He had come to find out that reality was more than a dream, much more than a dream!
She knew that there were all kinds of ways to make a conquest and that one of the surest roads to a woman’s genitals was through her sadness.
and she realized that she (her soul) was not at all involved, only her body, her body alone. The body that had betrayed her and that she had sent out into the world among other bodies.
The situation is very slightly solemn and thus embarrassing, as are all such situations when after the initial lovemaking, the lovers confront a future they are suddenly required to take on.
People who shout joy from the rooftops are often the saddest of all.
All novels . . . are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: what is the self? How can it be grasped?
The novel’s spirit is the spirit of complexity. . . . The novel’s spirit is the spirity of continuity . . . a thing made to last, to connect the past with the future.
Vertigo is something else than the fear of falling. It is the voice of emptiness below us which temps and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defense ourselves.
Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one’s painful self through the world.But being, being is happiness. Being: Becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain.
If we do not know what future the present is leading us toward, how can we say whether this present is good or bad, whether it deserves our concurrence, or our suspicion, or our hatred?
The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.
Our dreams prove that to imagine – to dream about things that have not happened – is among mankind’s deepest needs.
The Greek word for “return” is nostos. Algos means “suffering.” So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.
Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events; but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth.
for there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.
The children laughing without knowing why – isn’t that beautiful?
What we have not chosen we cannot consider either to our merit or our failure.
There was not a scrap of tangible evidence to show that he had spent the most wonderful year of his life with her.Which only increased his desire to remain faithful to her.
…no one can do a thing about feelings, they exist and there’s no way to censor them. We can reproach ourselves for some action, for a remark, but not for a feeling, quite simply because we have no control at all over it.
The ludicrous element in our feeling does not make them any less authentic.
Our historical experience teaches us that men imitate one another, that their attitudes are statistically calculable, their opinions manipulable, and that man is therefore less an individual (a subject) than an element in a mass.
The termites of reduction have always gnawed away at life: even the greatest love ends up as a skeleton of feeble memories.
she had experienced something beautiful, and he had failed to experience it with her. The two ways in which their memories reacted to the evening storm sharply delimit love and non-love.
[mother] belonged to a realm of other creatures: smaller, lighter, more easily blown away.
He thought: that’s certainly how it starts. One day a person puts his legs up on a bench, then night comes and he falls asleep. That’s how it happens that one fine day a person joins the tramps and turns into one of them.
Not everything written on Kafka is Kafkology. How then to define Kafkology? By a tautology: Kafkology is discourse for Kafkologizing Kafka. For replacing Kafka with the Kafkologized Kafka.
Without asking her permission, someone is trying to intrude her life, draw her attention, in short, to bother her.
Loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they too, fade away.
In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties.
Every situation is of man’s making and can only contain what man contains.
People meet in the course of life, they talk together, they discuss, they quarrel, without realizing that they’re talking to one another across a distance, each from an observation post standing in a different place in time.
There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless.
I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn’t know who I was or wanted to be.
Youth is a terrible thing: it is a stage trod by children in buskins and fancy costumes mouthing speeches they’ve memorized and fanatically believe but only half understand
The meaning did not precede the dream; the dream preceded the meaning. So the way to read the tale is to let the imagination carry one along. Not, above all, as a rebus to be decoded.
For it is clear immediately: human life as such is a defeat. All we can do in the face of that ineluctable defeat called life is to try to understand it. That – that is the raison d’être of the art of the novel.
The novel is born not of the theoretical spirit but of the spirit of humor.
It’s not your enemies who condemn you to solitude, it’s your friends
In modern times an idea can be refuted, yes, but not retracted
It is a tragicomic fact that our proper upbringing has become an ally of the secret police. (…) The “Tell the truth!” imperative drummed into us so automatically that we feel ashamed of lying even to a secret policeman.
Humanity’s true moral test, its fundamental test…consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals.
People fascinated by the idea of progress never suspect that every step forward is also a step on the way to the end and that behind all the joyous ‘onward and upward’ slogans lurks the lascivious voice of death urging us to make haste.
metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love
We’ve known for a long time that it was no longer possible to overturn this world, nor reshape it, nor head off its dangerous headlong rush. There’s been only one possible resistance: to not take it seriously.
Metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with.
True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.
Betrayal means breaking ranks and going off into the unknown. Sabina knew of nothing more magnificent than going off into the unknown.
given the nature of the human couple, the love of a man and a woman is a priori inferior to that which can exist (at least in the best instances) in the love between man and dog…It is a completely selfless love.
Dogs are our link to Paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring — it was peace.
How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present? You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more
If I were a doctor, I would diagnose his condition thus: “The patient is suffering from nostalgic insufficiency.
an old villa surrounded by a garden looked to them like the image of a comforting home, the dream of an idyll long past.
It was the incommunicable scent of this country, its intangible essence, that she had brought along with her to France.
Jealousy isn’t a pleasant quality, but if it isn’t overdone (and if it’s combined with modesty), apart from its inconvenience there’s even something touching about it.
Jealousy has the amazing power to illuminate a single person in an intense beam of light, keeping the multitude of others in total darkness.
Jealousy is like a raging toothache. One cannot do anything when one is jealous, not even sit down. Once can only come and go. Back and forth.
If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus was nailed to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect.
Scepticism does not abolish the world, it turns it into questions.
Her weakness was aggressive and kept forcing him to capitulate until eventually he lost his strength and was transformed into the rabbit in her arms .
The physical contact with people who struck and trampled and killed one another seemed far worse to him than a solitary death in the purity of the waters.
Eventually we come to know and understand a lot of things, but it’s too late, because a whole life has already been determined at a stage when we didn’t know a thing.
In a society run by terror, no statements whatsoever can be taken seriously. They are all forced, and it is the duty of every honest man to ignore them.
Biographers know nothing about the intimate sex lives of their own wives, but they think they know all about Stendhal’s or Faulkner’s.
For existential mathematics, which does not exist, would probably propose this equation: the value of coincidence equals the degree of its improbability.
It is a tragicomic fact that our proper upbringing has become an ally of the secret police. We do not know how to lie.
Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.
He yearned to step out of his life the way one steps out of a house into the street.
The cemetery was vanity transmogrified into stone. Instead of growing more sensible in death, the inhabitants of the cemetery were sillier than they had been in life.
Isn’t that exactly the definition of biography? An artificial logic imposed on an ‘incoherent succession of images’?
Business has only two functions – marketing and innovation.
The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.
The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.
A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.
Dogs are our link to paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent.
Mysticism and exaggeration go together. A mystic must not fear ridicule if he is to push all the way to the limits of humility or the limits of delight.
Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.
You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.
There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos.
To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring – it was peace.
He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him.