In this country people don't respect the morning. An alarm clock violently wakes them up, shatters their sleep like the blow of an ax, and they immediately surrender themselves to deadly haste. Can yo...
In the sunet of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia.
In that etymological light nostalgia seems something like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing. You are far away, and I don’t know what has become of you. My country is far away, and I don’t know wha...
In spite of their love, they had made each other's life a hell. The fact that they loved each other was merely proof that the fault lay not in themselves, in their behavior or inconstancy of feeling,...
In Wenceslaus Square, in Prague, a guy is throwing up. Another guy comes up to him, pulls a long face, shakes his head, and says: I know just what you mean.
In Ferdydurke, Gombrowicz got at the fundamental shift that occurred during the twentieth century: until then mankind was divided in two--those who defended the status quo and those who sought to chan...
If you don't care about the destination, you don't ask where you're going.
If he invited her to come, then come she would, and offer him up her life.
If I imagine the genesis of a novelist in the form of an exemplary tale, a myth, that genesis looks to me like a conversion story: Saul becoming Paul; the novelist being born from the ruins of his lyr...
I want you to be weak. As weak as I am.
I understood that there was no escaping the memories, that I was surround by them. (p.30)
I looked at her; I saw a slipshod permanet crumpling her hair into a shapeless mass of curls; I saw a brown overcoat, pitifully threadbare and a bit too shot; I saw a face both unobtrusively attractiv...
I have to lie, if I don't want to take madmen seriously and become a madman myself
I am obedient. I can never say no to those weaker than myself. And because I am six feet two and can lift a two-hundred-pound sack with one hand, in all my life I have yet to find anyone I can resist.
How could someone who had so little respect for people be so dependent on what they thought of him?
His connection to his life was that of a sculptor to his statue or a novelist to his novel. It is an inviolable right of a novelist to rework his novel. If the opening does not please him, he can rewr...
He was well aware that of the two of three thousand times he had made love (how many times had he made love in his life?) only two or three were really essential and unforgettable. The rest were mere...
He was repelled by the pettiness that reduced life to mere existence and that turned men into half-men. He wanted to lay his life on a balance, the other side of which was weighted with death. He want...
From the top of the staircase she sees the London train, modern and elegant, and she tells herself again: Whether it's good luck or bad to be born onto this earth, the best way to spend a life here is...
For the body is temporal and thought is eternal and the shimmering essence of flame is an image of thought.