Good sex is better than bad sex. Bad sex is better than no sex, except when no sex is better than bad sex. Self-sex is better than no sex, except when no sex is better than self-sex. Sad sex is always...
Flaubert thought democracy merely a stage in the history of government, and he thought it a typical vanity on our part to assume that it represented the finest, proudest way for men to rule one anothe...
Everyone in the Village, every grown-up—or rather, every middle-aged person—seemed to do crosswords: my parents, their friends, Joan, Gordon Macleod. Everyone apart from Susan. They did either The Tim...
Et combien faut-il de ces petites garces pour faire 2,5kg à votre avis? Je vais vous le dire : il en faut 300, c'est-à-dire, une fois coupées, 600 morceaux baignant dans leur jus, des pépins à ôter 60...
Do the books that writers don't write matter? It's easy to forget them, to assume that the apocryphal bibliography must contain nothing but bad ideas, justly abandoned projects, embarrassing first tho...
Discovering, for example, that as witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. [p. 65]
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 calle...
But there is panic and pandemonium waiting to break out inside all of us, of this I am convinced. I’ve seen it roar out among the dying, as a last protest against the human condition and its chronic s...
But the moment I realized that Pomiane was not just sympathetic but deeply on my side came in his recipe for Bœuf à la Ficelle (top rump suspended in boiling water by a string). When it is done, you a...
But it’s still the eyes we look at, isn’t it? That’s where we found the other person
But ignoring the bad things makes you end up believing that bad things never happen. You are always surprised by them. It surprises you that guns kill, that money corrupts, that snow falls in winter....
But if nostalgia means the powerful recollection of strong emotions—and a regret that such feelings are no longer present in our lives—then I plead guilty.
Better to take life seriously, and reach for light solutions. Satire, for instance; or suicide. Why did people hold so fast to life, that thing they were given without being consulted? All lives were...
Anyway... she's asleep, turned away from me on her side. The usual stratagems and repositionings have failed to induce narcosis in me, so I decide to settle myself against the soft zigzag of her body....
And so, perhaps, with grief. We imagine we have battled against it, been purposeful, overcome sorrow, scrubbed the rust from our soul, when all that has happened is that grief has moved elsewhere, shi...
Als je een goed boek leest, ontsnap je niet aan het leven, je stort je er juist dieper in. Er kan sprake zijn van een oppervlakkige ontsnapping – in verschillende landen, mores, spraakpatronen – maar...
Again, I must stress that this is my reading now of what happened then. Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time.
Adrian, however, pushed us to believe in the application of thought to life, in the notion
Y lo mismo ocurre con nuestra vida: tan clara,tan segura, hasta que por una razón u otra —el globo se mueve, la nube se dispersa, elsol cambia de ángulo— la imagen se pierde para siempre, se torna acc...
On grief) And you do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs into sunshine and that swift, r...