So much of life was stillness then, when we were young, or so it seems now; a biding stillness; a vigilance. We were waiting in our as yet unfashioned world, scanning the future as the boy and I had scanned each other, like soldiers in the field, watching for what was to come.
From this day forward all would be dissembling. There would be no other way to live with death.
I looked aside quickly for fear my eyes would give me away; one's eyes are always those of someone else, the mad and desperate dwarf crouched within.
And my life is changed forever. But then, at what moment, of all our moments, is life not utterly, utterly changed, until the final, most momentous change of all?
Their unhappiness was one of the constants of my earliest years, a high, unceasing buzz just beyond hearing.
Adolescence. Is it the first time in life we discover that we have something terrible to hide from those who love us?
To me, death had always been invested with solemnity and dignity. It had been peaceful in its occurrence, sacred in its ceremonial. But death in its more sordid and terrible aspects was a thing with which I had been unacquainted till now.
You who suffer because you love, love still more. To die of love, is to live by it.
To be loved, baby, hard at once and forever to strengthen you against the loveless world. Remember that.
The paradox of education is precisely this — that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity.
One writes out of one thing only—one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.
What chance would the likes of you, honest simpleton, have of keeping yourself fed in this merciless world of ours?
Wait until you're afraid of living ten years alone with no companion and a nursing home at the end of it. Then you'll start running in any direction, even away from that girl in the red dressing-gown, to find someone, any one,who will last until you are through.
All the distress signals . . . people who are not sighing but crying, not dangling but strangling, not holding up but holding on, not asking but pleading . . .
The mind is a garden.
His existence no more entered their vision than the air itself. His appearance caused no more ripple of unrest than a drop of water in the Japan Sea.
There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.
We live in the kind of world where there is so much insecurity, where people seek such protection in the pack, in uniformity, that they always have to be reassured.
It's so horribly, desperately easy to fail at being grown-up.
What's a cathedral without people?
The first act of the life's tragedy begins the moment we form a parent-child relationship.
Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent—which attitude certainly has a great deal to support it. On the other hand, it is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important.
The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation. The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.
Better hope deferred than none. Up to a point. Till the heart starts to sicken.
Real tragedy is never resolved. It goes on hopelessly for ever. Conventional tragedy is too easy. The hero dies and we feel a purging of the emotions.
Death is the perfecting medium.
The past beats inside me like a second heart."
One starts promiscuous and ends like one's grandfather, faithful to one woman.
Life, so it used to seem to me, my dear Regina, is a formless and forever shifting stuff, a globe of molten glass, say, which we have been flung, and which, without even the crudest of instruments, with only our bare hands, we must shape into a perfect sphere, in order to be able to contain it within ourselves.
But after all, the rumors with which his name was connected were rumors only,—noise, sayings, words; less than words.
What Is Love? I have met in the streets a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, the water passed through his shoes and the stars through his soul.
I've spent my life plunged to the elbows in the secrets of others, their dirty little sins. What does it matter what people do? I mean, when it's done it's done.
At the final moment, we shall at last perceive the secret and essential form of all we have been, of all our actions and thoughts.
You cannot plant greatness as you plant yams or maize. The great tree chooses where to grow and we find it there, so it is with the greatness in men.
Better a sick heart than none. Till it starts to break.
Like a sleepwalker, like a robot, I felt as if its words had begun to control my muscles.
Life is an Olympic Game hosted by a group of lunatics.
Dawn dispels darkness each morning in an unending miracle of rebirth.
I’m sorry to tell you that we are now completely fed up with life and that we all want to die immediately. Just by thinking that the pleasure of dying is a privilege of the living, we thank our ancestors, or rather, their enlightenment based on the rationalist spirit…
Nature cannot suffer the human form within her system of laws. When given to her charge, the human being before us is reduced to dust. Ours is the most perfect form to be found on earth. The visible world sustains us until life leaves, and then it must utterly destroy us.
Which is why places like this always have to pin their hopes for the future on young people. They're the only ones who don't remember that things actually used to be better. That can be a blessing.
He knows it's only a game. But we're a town in the middle of the forest. We've got no tourism, no mine, no high-tech industry. We've got darkness, cold and unemployment.
The wish to become a writer is simply egoism: the desire to become a puppet master and thus separate oneself from other puppets
Darkness, when once it fell, fell like a stone.
Life is a series of pulls back and forth. You want to do one thing, but you are bound to do something else. Something hurts you, yet you know it shouldn't. You take certain things for granted, even when you know you should never take anything for granted. A tension of opposites, like a pull on a rubber band. And most of us live somewhere in the middle.
She was fond of her children in an uneven, impulsive way. She would sometimes gather them passionately to her heart; she would sometimes forget them. Their absence was a sort of relief, though she did not admit this, even to herself. It seemed to free her of a responsibility which she had blindly assumed and for which Fate had not fitted her.
I believed that higher knowledge was shared out among all human beings. What else was there to hold us together but this force hidden behind daily consciousness?
At the end of your career you're trying to find a point to it all, and at the start of it you're looking for a purpose.
Is it that I do not tell the truth, is that it, that some day somehow I may tell the truth at last and then no more light at last, for the truth?
We are no longer limited by ignorance and lack of purpose; but our ignorance is still enormous. The road we have to travel still stretches into the distance. It is impossible for me to explain the nature of the problems that confront us. If human beings were capable of understanding, there would be no need to explain.