We live, we die, we are remembered, we are forgotten.
There's something wrong with the young who can't be fascinated by a genius.
The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.
The more you learn, the less you fear. Learn not in the sense of academic study, but in the practical understanding of life.
Sabía ya que sólo las viejas palabras servían: muerte, congoja, tristeza, pesar, sufrimiento. Nada moderadamente evasivo o medicinal. La aflicción es un estado humano, no médico, y aunque haya píldora...
Life always refused simplicity.
In those years before mobile phones, email and Skype, travelers depended on the rudimentary communications system known as the postcard. Other methods--the long-distance phone call, the telegram--were...
If you remember your past too well you start blaming your present for it. Look what they did to me, that's what caused me to be like this, it's not my fault. Permit me to correct you: it probably is y...
I must confess that in all the times I read Madame Bovary, I never noticed the heroine's rainbow eyes. Should I have? Would you? Was I perhaps too busy noticing things that Dr Starkie was missing (tho...
For instance: that when we are young and sensitive, we are also at our most hurtful; whereas when the blood begins to slow, when we feel less sharply, when we are more armoured and have learnt how to...
But then, no one told the whole truth about sex. And in that respect, nothing has changed.
And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.
• Vivemos no tempo – ele contém-nos e molda-nos – mas nunca senti que o compreendesse muito bem. E não me refiro a teorias sobre o modo como cede, recua e dá meia volta, ou poderá existir algures em v...
You find yourself repeating, They grow up so quickly, don't they? when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me nowadays.
Taxi-drivers in Frankfurt are said to dislike the annual Book Fair because literary folk, instead of being shuttled to prostitutes like respectable members of other convening professions, prefer to st...
Our parents thought we might be corrupted by one another into becoming whatever it was they most feared: an incorrigible masturbator, a winsome homosexual, a recklessly impregnatory libertine. On our...
Martha was a clever girl, and therefore not a believer.
Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally,...
I would have to go back into my past and deal with Adrian. My philosopher friend, who gazed on life and decided that any responsible, thinking individual should have the right to reject this gift that...
History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated.