The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become
The mediation of a woman is capable of imposing on hatred certain qualities characteristic of affection, for example curiosity, carnal interest, the urge to cross the threshold of intimacy.
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 love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.The heaviest of burdens is there...
The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.
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 crematory fire is the only way our bodies can escape them. It's the absolute death.
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...
The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful ... Love begins with a metaphor. Wh...
The Greek word for return is nostos. Algos means suffering. So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return. To express that fundamental notion most Europeans can utilize a wo...
Tenía ganas de hacer algo para que ya no le quedara escapatoria. Tenía ganas de destruir brutalmente todo el pasado de sus últimos siete años.Era el vértigo. El embriagador, el insuperable deseo de ca...
Tamina serves coffee and calvados to the customers (there aren't all that many, the room being always half empty) and then goes back behind the bar. Almost always there is someone sitting on a barstoo...
Tamina feels that the eyes of a single outsider are enough to destroy the worth of her personal diaries, while Goethe thinks that if a single individual fails to set eyes on his lines, that individual...
Sometimes (more in sport than from real concern) I defended myself against the charge of individualism and demanded from the others proof that I was an individualist. For want of concrete evidence the...
Shit is a more onerous theological problem than is evil.
She was in the grip of an insuperable longing to fall. She lived in a constant state of vertigo. Pick me up, is the message of a person who keeps falling.
She knew, of course that she was being supremely unfair, that Franz was the best man she ever had- he was intelligent, he understood her paintings, he was handsome and good-but the more she thought ab...