We can never establish with certainty which part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions--love, antipathy, charity, or malice--and what part is predetermined by the constant power p...
We all reject out of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or weightless; we presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would no longer be the same; we feel th...
Vlasta me reprocha que soy un soñador. Parece que no veo las cosas tal como son. No, veo las cosas tal como son, pero además de las cosas visibles veo también las invisibles. Las ideas inventadas no s...
Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's very beautiful. But what would they nourish their intimate talk with? However contemptible the world may be, they still need it to be able to...
Tu t'imagines qu'un mensonge en vaut un autre, mais tu as tort. Je peux inventer n'importe quoi, me payer la tête des gens, monter toutes sortes de mystifications, faire toutes sortes de blagues, je n...
To be mortal is the most basic human experience and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly. Man doesn't know how to be mortal. And when he dies, he doesn't even kno...
This was exactly what the girl had most dreaded all her life and had scrupulously avoided until now: lovemaking without emotion or love. She knew that she had crossed the forbidden boundary, but she p...
This reconciliation with Hitler reveals the profound moral perversity of a world that rests essentially on the nonexistence of return, for in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore...
They talk on about death, about boredom, they drink wine, they laugh, they have a good time, they are happy.
There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weights so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, with someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred ech...
There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.A man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him....
The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse. There is no certai...
The psychological and physiological mechanism of love is so complex that at a certain period in his life a young man must concentrate all his energy on coming to grips with it, and in this way he miss...
The ostriches were like messengers who had learned their vital message by heart, but whose vocal chords had been slit by the enemy, so that when they finally reached their goal, all they could do was...
The only thing that makes me somewhat sceptical regarding human procreation is the unintelligent selection of parents. Some of the most unattractive individuals in the world feel they must multiply at...
The novel is the fruit of a human illusion. The illusion of the power to understand others. But what do we know of one another?
The moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies…
The meaning did not precede the dream; the dream preceded the meaning. So the way to read the tale is to let the imagination carry one along. Not, above all, as a rebus to be decoded.
The individual I is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered.
The entire human species has good reason to go down into the streets and shout 'We are all writers!' For everyone is pained with the thought of disappearing, unheard, and unseen into an indifferent un...