The psychological and physiological mechanism of love is so complex that at a certain period in his life a young man must concentrate all his energy on coming to grips with it, and in this way he misses the actual content of the love: the woman he loves. (In this he is much like a young violinist who cannot concentrate on the emotional content of a piece until the technique required to play it comes automatically.)
Art arises from sources other than logic." (p.32)
When I was a little boy in short pants, I dreamed about a miraculous ointment that would make me invisible. Then I became an adult, began to write, and wanted to be successful. Now I'm successful and would like to have the ointment that would make me invisible.
My lifelong ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form.
I am not worthy of my suffering. A great sentence. It suggests not only that suffering is the basis of the self, its sole indubitable ontological proof, but also that it is the one feeling most worthy of respect; the value of all values.
Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are clearly more complicated.
The history of music is mortal, but the idiocy of the guitar is eternal.
Yes, it's crazy. Love is either crazy or it's nothing at all.
We are born one time only, we can never start a new life equipped with the experience we've gained from the previous one. We leave childhood without knowing what youth is, we marry without knowing what it is to be married, and even when we enter old age, we don't know what it is we're heading for: the old are innocent children innocent of thier old age. In that sense, man's world is the planet of inexperience.
How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present? You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more.
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 suffering the world disappears and each of us is alone with his self. Suffering is the university of ego-centrism.
You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.
Seeing is limited by two borders: Strong light, which blinds, and total darkness.
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 everyone.
Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding. From the viewpoint of the novel's wisdom, that fervid readiness to judge is the most detestable stupidity, the most pernicious evil.
In the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.
He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.
Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
Man reckons with immortality, and forgets to reckon with death.
And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?
The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question.
Immortality is a ridiculous illusion, an empty word, a butterfly net chasing the wind.
But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.
A constant interrogation.
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