Jaromil had always regarded the future as an awesome mystery. It comprised everything unknown, and for that reason it lured and terrified. It was the opposite of certainty, the opposite of home.
It was time laid bare, time in and of itself, time at its most basic and primal, and it forced me to call it by its true name (for now I was living pure time—pure, vacant time) so as not to forget it...
It was a curious game. This curiousness was evidenced, for example, in the fact that the young man, even though he himself was playing the unknown driver remarkably well, did not for a moment stop see...
It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences (like the meeting of Anna, Vronsky, the railway station, and death or the meeting of Beethoven, Tomas, Tereza, and...
Is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about?
In times when history still moved slowly, events were few and far between and easily committed to memory. They formed a commonly accepted for thrilling scenes of adventure in private life. Nowadays,...
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 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 in the past people would listen to music out of love for music, nowadays it roars everywhere and all the time, regardless whether we want to hear it, it roars from loudspeakers, in cars, in restaur...
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 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...
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...
He suddenly felt dismayed at how little he had seen of her the last two years; he had so few opportunities to press her hands in his to stop them from trembling.
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...
Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out is mute. Only chance can speak to us. We read its message much as gypsies read the images made by coffee groun...
Even though the sewer pipelines reach far into our houses with their tentacles, they are carefully hidden from view and we are happily ignorant of the invisible Venice of shit underlying our bathrooms...
Even at the age of eight she would fall asleep by pressing one hand into the other and making believe she was holding the hand of the man whom she loved, the man of her life. So if in her sleep she pr...