For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as do the ordinary people, but to fulfill it in its...
Music is only love looking for words.
Slowly the bluish spring moon climbs the houses, sliding up the minarets into the clicking palm-trees, and with it the city seems to uncurl like some hibernating animal dug out of its winter earth, to...
In India when I was a boy they had great big green lizards there, and if you shouted or shot them their tails would fall off. There was only one boy in the school who could catch lizards intact. No on...
To be the equal of reality you must learn how to ignore it without danger.
There are only three things to be done with a woman’ said Clea once. ‘You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.
Some characters in the world are marked down for self-destruction, and to these no amount of rational argument can appeal.
La culpa se apresura siempre hacia su complemento, el castigo, y sólo allí encuentra satisfacción.
Its women shall be the voluptuaries not of pleasure but of pain, doomed to hunt for what they least dare to find.
Each of our five senses contains an art.
The desire to be near the beloved object is at first not due to the idea of possessing it, but simply to let the two experiences compare themselves, like reflections in different mirrors... For from h...
And all at once it seemed that past and present had joined again without any divisions in it, and that all my memories and impressions had ordered themselves into one complete pattern whose metaphor w...
We were like mourners at an invisible cenotaph during the two minutes’ silence which commemorates an irremediable failure of the human will.
The real teacher is endurance.
Nature had combined in him the features of a degenerate pope and the torpor of a crocodile, and to these had added a voice of unconscionable harshness.
‘Life is more complicated than we think, yet far simpler than anyone dares to imagine’.)
We live writes Pursewarden somewhere, lives based upon selected fictions. Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time - not by our personalities as we like to think. Thus ever...
There are two positions available to us – either crime which renders us happy, or the noose, which prevents us from being unhappy.
There are some characters in this world who are marked down for self-destruction, and to these no amount of rational argument can appeal. For my part Justine always reminded me of a somnambulist disco...
The oranges were more plentiful than usual that year. They glowed in their arbours of burnished green leaf like lanterns, flickering up there among the sunny woods. It was as if they were eager to cel...