It had to happen to you, to concentrate your whole life on one point, and then discover that you can do anything except live at that point.
Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality.
We want Realism’s wealth of experience and Symbolism’s depth of feeling. All art is a problem of balance between two opposites.
There is no finer revenge than that which others inflict on your enemy. Moreover, it has the advantage of leaving you the role of a generous man.
A decision, an action, are infallible omens of what we shall do another time, not for any vague, mystic, astrological reason but because they result from an automatic reaction that will repeat itself.
Generations do not age. Every youth of any period, any civilization, has the same possibilities as always.
We commit two wrongs when we fail to right a wrong.
We can all do good deeds, but very few of us can think good thoughts.
A work settles nothing, just as the labor of a whole generation settles nothing. Sons, and the morrow, always start afresh.
Reality is a prison, where one vegetates and always will...
Writing is a fine thing, because it combines the two pleasures of talking to yourself and talking to a crowd.
The cadence of suffering has begun. Every evening at dusk, my heart constricts until night has come.
Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends.
But here’s the worst part: the trick to life lies in hiding from those we hold most dear how much they mean to is; if not, we’d lose them.
There is mercy for everyone, except those who are bored with life.
You need a village, if only for the pleasure of leaving it. A village means that you are not alone, knowing that in the people, the trees, the earth, there is something that belongs to you, waiting for you when you are not there.
Reality is a prison, where one vegetates and always will. All the rest – thought, action – is just a pastime, mental or physical. What counts then, is to come to grips with reality. The rest can go.
Woman gives herself as a prize to the weak and as a prop to the strong and no man ever has what he should.
At great periods you have always felt, deep within you, the temptation to commit suicide. You gave yourself to it, breached your own defenses. You were a child. The idea of suicide was a protest against life; by dying, you would escape this longing for death.
The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, gauge it, sound it out and descend into it.