No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.
Aren't we living in a world where heedless men only desire decapitated women?
Graphomania (a mania for writing books) inevitably takes on epidemic proportions when a society develops to the point of creating three basic conditions: - (1) an elevated level of general well being which allows people to devote themselves to useless activities (2) a high degree of social atomization and , as a consequence, a general isolation of individuals; (3) the absence of dramatic social changes in the nation's internal life.
What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating.
Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.
Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.
But what had happened, had happened, and it was no longer possible to right anything.
Today we're all alike, all of us bound together by our shared apathy toward work. That very apathy has become a passion. The one great collective passion of our time.
People derived too much pleasure from seeing their fellow man morally humiliated to spoil that pleasure by hearing out an explanation.
...[P]eople who shout joy from the rooftops are often the saddest of all... (p.24)
Radio... force-feeds us music... everywhere and all the time... sewage-water music in which music is dying.
What is unique about the "I" hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual "I" is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered.
We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions - love, antipathy, charity, or malice - and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.
Bacon's portraits are an interrogation on the limits of the self. Up to what degree of distortion does an individual still remain himself? To what degree of distortion does a beloved person still remain a beloved person? For how long does a cherished face growing remote through illness, through madness, through hatred, through death still remain recognizable? Where is the border beyond which a self ceases to be a self?
The beauty of New York is unintentional; it arose independent of human design, like a stalagmite cavern.
To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.
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 to let yourself be carried along, as I am moving at this moment, by a cheerful, noisy crowd moving forward.
War and culture, those are the two poles of Europe, her heaven and hell, her glory and shame, and they cannot be separated from one another. When one comes to an end, the other will end also and one cannot end without the other. The fact that no war has broken out in Europe for fifty years is connected in some mysterious way with the fact that for fifty years no new Picasso has appeared either.
Extremism means borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.
But if God is gone and man is no longer master, then who is master?
I find myself fascinating.
I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn't know who I was or wanted to be.
From tender youth we are told by father and teacher that betrayal is the most heinous offence imaginable. But what is betrayal? Betrayal means breaking ranks and breaking off into the unknown. Sabina knew of nothing more magnificent than going off into the unknown.
Disgust at having to talk about oneself is what distinguishes novelistic talent from lyric talent.
Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality.
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