There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact. In the course of a single s...
There was nothing to be done. From then on, there were flowers waiting for me every time we met, and in the end I gave in, because I was disarmed by the spontaneity of giving and understood tha Lucie...
There are things that can be accomplished only by violence. Physical love is unthinkable without violence.
There are moments in life when a man retreats defensively, when he must give ground, when he must surrender less important positions in order to protect the more important ones. But should it come to...
Then there is the third category, the category of people who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love. Their situation is a dangerous as the situation in the first category. One d...
The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.The more indifferent people are to politics, to the interests of others, the more obsessed they become wit...
The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and other creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse.
The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and foul and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse. There is no certai...
The senator had only one argument in his favour: his feeling. When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme.
The question that arises is this: had father hated the people on the ship, just as she now hates the motorcyclist and the man who mocked her because she covered her ears? No, Agnes cannot imagine that...
The pressure to make public retractions of past statements - there's something medieval about it. What does it mean, anyway, to 'retract' what you've said? How can anyone state categorically that a th...
The physical contact with people who struck and trampled and killed one another seemed far worse to him than a solitary death in the purity of the waters.
The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become
The man raised his glass, 'To you!'Can't you think of a wittier toast?'Something was beginning to irritate him about the girl's game. Now sitting face to face with her, he realized it wasn't just the...
The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest if burdens is...
The future is only an indifferent void no one cares about, but the past is filled with life, and its countenance is irritating, repellent, wounding, to the point that we want to destroy or repaint it....
The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have someone write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before l...
The feeling, the irrepressible yearning to return, suddenly reveals to her the existence of the past, the power of the past, of her past; in the house of her life there are windows now, windows openin...
The episode of Banaka pointing to his chest and crying out of existential anguish reminds me of a line from Goethe’s West-East Divan: Is one man alive when others are alive? Deep within Goethe’s query...
The consciousness of my own baseness has done nothing to reconcile me to the baseness of others. Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in o...