Jenže vzpomínky, které nám nakonec zůstanou, se přece pokaždé neshodují s tím, co jsme viděli na vlastní oči.
I’d ban coincidences, if I were a dictator of fiction. Well, perhaps not entirely. Coincidences would be permitted in the picaresque; that’s where they belong. Go on, take them: let
In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when the moment came, our lives -- and time itself -- would speed up. How wer...
In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.
If you’re that clever you can argue yourself into anything.
If a memory wasn't a thing but a memory of a memory of a memory, mirrors set in parallel, then what the brain told you now about what it claimed had happened then would be coloured by what had happene...
I used to think I knew all the answers...That's why I left. I know what to do, I thought. Perhaps you have to persuade yourself you know the answers, otherwise you don't ever do anything. I thought I...
I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, i...
I didn’t want the day to unravel. Though looking back, it was not the day, but the four of us, that were beginning to unravel.
I could only reply that I think---I theorise--that something--something else--happens to the memory over time. For years you survive with the same loops, the same facts and the same emotions...The eve...
He never married, and he never learned to dance. He was so resistant to dancing that most of the principal male characters in his novels take sympathetic action and refuse to dance as well.
He had entered some state of grace—but one that did not exclude. He made you feel you were his co-thinker, even if you said nothing.
Grief reconfigures time, its length, its texture, its function: one day means no more than the next, so why have they been picked out and given separate names?
For some, Life is rich and creamy, made according to an old peasant recipe from nothing but natural products, while Art is a pallid commercial confection, consisting mainly of artificial colourings an...
But time … how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we ca...
But then lovers always assume that people are on their side.
But he would never join their number, never be a member of the smiling retinue of former lovers. He considered that sort of behavior rather beastly, in fact immoral. He refused to be turned from a lov...
But art and religion will always shadow one another through the abstract nouns they both invoke: truth, seriousness, imagination, sympathy, morality, transcendence.
Books are not life, however much we may wish they were
At times, I suspect that the concept of maturity is maintained by a conspiracy of niceness.