I had learned bit by bit the art of meeting people with a straight face – no, that’s not true: I have never been able to meet anyone without an accompaniment of painful smiles, the buffoonery of defeat. What I had acquired was the technique of stammering somehow, almost in a daze, the necessary small talk.
Despair is impossible in humans. They often are deceived by hope, but are also deceived by the notion of despair.
Genuine beauty is always meaningless, without virtue.
Women sleep so soundly they seem to be dead. Who knows? Women may live in order to sleep.
By living this way, what will my fortune be? There is nothing. Am I simply a sickly man? What should I do? I had no direction, nothing. I thought that this reckless life of mine was only a nuisance to others and devoid of meaning. This was quite hard to bear.
It made me miserable that I was rapidly becoming an adult and that I was unable to do anything about it.
Falling asleep is such a strange feeling. It’s like a carp or an eel is tugging on a fishing line, or something heavy like a lead weight is pulling on the line that I’m holding with my head, and as I doze off to sleep, the line slackens up a bit. When that happens, it startles me back to awareness. Then it pulls me again. I doze off to sleep. The line loosens a bit again. This goes on three or four times, and then, with the first really big tug, this time it lasts until morning.
Every family,” he jested, “has a fool – just to keep it in touch with reality.
What a holy thing uncorrupted virginity is, I thought.
One lies to seek a bit of relief from a ponderous, suffocating reality, but the liar, like the drinker, gradually comes to need larger and larger doses. The lies become blacker and more complex, and they mesh and rub together until in the end they shine with the luster of truth.
A life free of lies! Ah, but that, too, was, by definition, a lie. Surely a lie already dwelled in the heart of anyone who sought to make such distinctions and stand in judgment.
You’ve treated me nicely, yes, but only because you find me curious and amusing. It’s made me feel so lonely, somehow.
Even the servants, when asked by my mother about the meeting, answered as if it were their spontaneous thought, that it had been really interesting. These were the self-same servants who had been bitterly complaining on the way home that political meetings are the most boring thing in the world.
I wonder if I have ever actually been happy. People have told me, really more times than I can remember, ever since I was a small boy, how lucky I was, but I have always felt as if I were suffering in hell. It has seemed to me in fact that those who called me lucky were incomparably more fortunate than I.
Is this what all you refined gentlemen are like – wishing and pining and never acting?
In terms of sealing your fate, there’s no difference between turning right on a whim and turning right because you’ve come to some momentous resolve. Either way, it can’t be undone.
If you don’t give a damn what the rest of the world is up to, you can be alone for a hundred years – a thousand years – with no difficulty whatsoever.
Or maybe it’s not about right and wrong at all but simply a humorous story suggesting that in our daily lives the people of this world abuse one another, punish one another, praise one another, and serve one another all on the basis of feelings – their likes and dislikes.
I drew with extremely excessively depressed emotions, deliberately penning each line, only to earn money for drink.
They called me by my first name and bought me drinks.