What you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.
It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.
The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.
Yes, of course we were pretentious – what else is youth for?
Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Women were brought up to believe that men were the answer. They weren’t. They weren’t even one of the questions.
I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory.
When we fall in love, we hope – both egotistically and altruistically – that we shall be finally, truly seen: judged and approved. Of course, love does not always bring approval: being seen may just as well lead to a thumbs-down and a season in hell.
Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.
The, at some point, sooner or later, for this reason or that, one of them is taken away. And what is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.
Oliver used to have a theory he called Love, etc.: in other words the world divides into people for whom love is everything and the rest of life is a mere ‘etc.,’ and people who don’t value love enough and find the most exciting part of life is the ’etc.
It is important to understand that in the modern world we prefer the replica to the original because it gives us the greater frisson. I leave that word in French because I think you understand it well that way.
Life versus Death becomes, as Montaigne pointed out, Old Age versus Death.
No sooner do we come into this world, than bits of us start to fall off.
Some Englishman once said that marriage is a long dull meal with the pudding served first.
Some admit the damage, and try to mitigate it; some spend their lives trying to help others who are damaged; and then there are those whose main concern is to avoid further damage to themselves, at whatever cost. And those are the ones who are ruthless, and the ones to be careful of.
How submerged does a reference have to be before it drowns?
None of this, of course, was ever stated: the genteel social Darwinism of the English middle classes always remained implicit.
Martha was a clever girl, and therefore not a believer.
Sejarah bukanlah apa yang terjadi. Sejarah hanyalah apa yang dituturkan sejarawan kepada kita.