Do you know what Nabokov said about adultery in his lecture on Madame Bovary? He said it was 'a most conventional way to rise above the conventional'.
Die Bücher sagen: Sie hat es getan, weil. Das Leben sagt: Sie hat es getan. In den Büchern werden einem die Dinge erklärt; im Leben nicht. Es überrascht mich nicht, dass manche Leute Bücher vorziehen....
Did you leave me because of me? No, she said. I left you because of us.
But you find yourself repeating, They grow up so quickly, don’t they? when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me nowadays.
But if you think these are the only categories of sex that exist, you find you are mistaken. Because there is a category which you had not known to exist, something which isn’t, as you might have gues...
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 cockteasing is also a metaphor: she is someone who will manipulate your inner self while holding hers back from you.
But aeronautics purged the sin of height, otherwise known as the sin of getting above yourself.
But I remember what Old Joe Hunt said when arguing with Adrian: that mental states can be inferred from actions. That’s in history—Henry VIII and all that. Whereas in the private life, I think the con...
But I don't remember. I won't remember. Memory is an act of will, and so is forgetting.
Books are not life, however much we may wish they were
Blame someone else, that’s always your first instinct. And if you can’t blame someone else, then start claiming the problem isn’t a problem anyway. Rewrite the rules, shift the goalposts.
Bet kai esi labai protingas, tai, manau, kas nors gali išmušti tave iš vėžių, jeigu nepasisaugosi
At a social event she and I would normally have attended together, an acquaintance came up and said to me, simply, There’s someone missing. That felt correct, in both senses.
Apropo, cum preferati, autodistrugerea prin lipsa cunoasterii sau prin acumularea cunoasterii de sine?
Apart from these parental physical jerks, he did not train his body; he merely inhabited it. A friend had once shown what he called gymnastics for the intelligentsia. You took a box of matches and thr...
Another piece of appropriated maternal wisdom I remember from this time was this: If you lower your expectations, you can’t be disappointed. This struck me as a dismal approach to life, whether for a...
And you can never prepare for this new reality in which you have been dunked.
And yet, for all this, for all that he was unparalleled in depicting tyrants knee-deep in blood, Shakespeare was a little naive. Because his monsters had doubts, bad dreams, pangs of conscience, guilt...
And sometimes all that happened was that the misleading old euphemisms were replaced by the misleading new clichés.