When a private talk over a bottle of wine is broadcast on the radio, what can it mean but that the world is turning into a concentration camp?
This symmetrical composition- the same motif appears at the beginning and at the end- may seem quite 'novelistic' to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading...
The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heigh...
The gigantic invisible broom that transforms, disfigures, erases landscapes has been at the job for millennia now, but its movements, which used to be slow, just barely perceptible, have sped up so mu...
The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have cirumvented....
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.
The basis of the self is not thought but suffering, which is the most fundamental of all feelings. While it suffers, not even a cat can doubt its unique and uninterchangeable self. In intense sufferin...
The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by ev...
That idea would be embarrassing because there is something excessive about it, it would take to much energy to defend (while the best possible progressive idea, so to speak, defends itself)...
Só o acaso pode nos parecer uma mensagem. Aquilo que acontece por necessidade, aquilo que é esperado e se repete cotidianamente é coisa muda apenas.
Si cada uno de los instantes de nuestra vida se va a repetir infinitas veces, estamos clavados a la eternidad como Jesucristo a la cruz. La imagen es terrible. En el mundo del eterno retorno descansa...
She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marchin...
She loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It differentiated her from the others
She knew that she had become a burden to him: she took things too seriously, turning everything into a tragedy, and failed to grasp the lightness and amusing insignificance of physical love. How she w...
She had come to him to escape her mother's world, a world where all bodies were equal. She had come to him to make her body unique, irreplaceble. But he, too had drawn an equal sign between her and th...
Rekao bih da je količina dosade, ako se dosadu može izmjeriti, danas mnogo veća nego nekoć. Jer su nekadašnja zanimanja, barem velikim dijelom, bila nezamisliva bez strastvene predanosti: seljaci zalj...
Or take an instance from the student’s childhood: His parents made him take violin lessons. He was not very gifted and his teacher would interrupt him to criticize his mistakes in a cold, unbearable v...
Only after a while did it occur to me (in spite of the chilly silence which surrounded me) that my story was not of the tragic sort, but rather of the comic variety.At any rate that afforded me some c...
Nós compreendemos há muito tempo que não era mais possível mudar este mundo, nem remodelá-lo, nem impedir sua infeliz trajetória para a frente. Havia uma única resistência possível: não levá-lo a séri...
No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.