When a person is clubbed violently on the head, he collapses and stops breathing. Some day, he will stop breathing anyway.
When I described Madame de T's night, I recalled the well-known equation from one of the first chapters of the textbook of existential mathematics: the degree of speed is directly proportional to the...
What remains of Beethoven?A frown, an improbable mane, and a somber voice intoning Es muss seine! ….And so n and so forth. Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into Kitsch. Kitsch is the stopove...
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...
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...
The woman he had loved most (he was thirty at the time) would tell him (he was nearly in despair when he heard it) that she held on to life by a thread. Yes, she did want to live, life gave her great...
The river flowed from century to century, and human affairs play themselves out on its banks. Play themselves out to be forgotten the next day, while the river flows on.
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's spirit is the spirit of complexity. . . . The novel's spirit is the spirity of continuity . . . a thing made to last, to connect the past with the future.
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 novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters.
The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it.
The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.
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...
That’s another enigma about memory, more basic than all the rest: do recollections have some measurable temporal volume? do they unfold over a span of time? […] And there lies the horror: the past we...
Tenderness is the attempt to create a tiny artificial space in which it is mutually agreed that each will treat the other like a child.
Speed is the form of ecstasy the technical revolution has bestowed on man. As opposed to a motorcyclist, the runner is always present in his body, forever required to think about his blisters, his exh...