Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization.
And anyway, I suspect he secretly liked it when a woman was cold and distant.
Perhaps; but I am a difficult person to live with. My difficulty consists in not wanting to live with other people.
I am not the we of anyone.
Pleasure is hard to come by, but pain is everywhere these days, I must learn to subsist on it.
I must not fall asleep in the middle of my life. Out of the blankness that surrounds me I must pluck the incident after incident after incident whose little explosions keep me going.
Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation.
Unimaginable perhaps; but the unimaginable is there to be imagined.
Nothing is worse than what we can imagine.
Perhaps we invented the gods so that we could put the blame on them. They gave us permission to eat flesh. They gave us permission to play with unclean things. It’s not our fault, it’s theirs. We’re just their children.
The devil is everywhere under the skin of things, searching for a way into the light.
Belief may be no more, in the end, than a source of energy, like a battery which one clips into an idea to make it run.
For himself, then. For his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing.
Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths.
The secret of happiness is not doing what we like but in liking what we do.
It’s admirable, what you do, what she does, but to me animal-welfare people are a bit like Christians of a certain kind. Everyone is so cheerful and well-intentioned that after a while you itch to go off and do some raping and pillaging. Or to kick a cat.
To the last we have learned nothing. In all of us, deep down, there seems to be something granite and unteachable. No one truly believes, despite the hysteria in the streets that the world of tranquil certainties we were born into is about to be extinguished.
Well, that is what you risk when you fall in love. You risk losing your dignity.
Do you hope you can expiate the crimes of the past by suffering in the present?
The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where another, unforeseen reading is always possible.