Loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.
Le but que l'on poursuit est toujours voilé. Une jeune fille qui a envie de se marier a envie d'une chose qui lui est tout à fait inconnue. Le jeune homme qui court après la gloire n'a aucune idée de...
Why don't you ever use your strength on me? she said.Because love means renouncing strength, said Franz softly.
What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating.
We won't understand a thing about human life if we persist in avoiding the most obvious fact: that a reality no longer is what it was when it was; it cannot be reconstructed.
They [human lives] are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven’s music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a...
Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless.
Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words. And suddenly he realized that all his life he had done nothing but talk, write, lecture, concoct sentences, search for formulations and amend them, so in...
No matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reign in the cemetery.
L'homme ne peut jamais savoir ce qu'il faut vouloir car il n'a qu'une vie et il ne peut ni la comparer à des vies antérieures ni la rectifier dans des vies ultérieures. (...) Il n'existe aucun moyen d...
In the kingdom of kitsch you would be a monster
If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and ma...
If a mother was Sacrifice personified, then a daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redress.
I've always had the sense that my life is run by other people.
I cannot hate them because nothing binds me to them; I have nothing in common with them.
How did the senator know that children meant happiness? Could he see into their souls? What if the moment they were out of sight, three of them jumped the fourth and began beating him up?
He was down and out, the Catholics took him in, and before he knew it, he had faith. So it was gratitude that decided the issue, most likely. Human decisions are terribly simple.
Franz, on the other hand, was certain that the division of life into private and public spheres is the source of all lies: a person is one thing in private and something quite different in public. For...
Agnes subtracts from her self everything that is exterior and borrowed, in order to come closer to her sheer essence (even with the risk that zero lurks at the bottom of the subtraction). Laura's meth...
Adventure, the first great theme of the novel.