Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that’s beautiful.
Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.
There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.
People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It’s not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone.
Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.
Fidelity gives a unity to lives that would otherwise splinter into thousands of split-second impressions.
Through the air floated only important words, and Flajsman said to himself that love has but one true measure, and that is death. At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love.
When his wife was at his side, she was also in front of him, marking out the horizon of his life. Now the horizon is empty: the view has changed.
Today I know this: when it comes time to take stock, the most painful wound is that of broken friendships; and there is nothing more foolish than to sacrifice a friendship to politics.
I cannot hate them because nothing binds me to them; I have nothing in common with them.
I am not worthy of my suffering. A great sentence. It suggests not only that suffering is the basis of the self, its sole indubitable ontological proof, but also that it is the one feeling most worthy of respect; the value of all values.
Yes, the essence of every love is a child, and it makes no difference at all whether it has ever actually been conceived or born. In the algebra of love a child is the symbol of the magical sum of two beings.
Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one’s painful self through the world. But being, being is happiness. Being: Becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain.
For existential mathematics, which does not exist, would probably propose this equation: the value of coincidence equals the degree of its improbability.
Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.
And there lies the horror: the past we remember is devoid of time. Impossible to reexperience a love the way we reread a book or resee a film.
Now time has a very different look; it is no longer the conquering present capturing the future; it is the present conquered and captured and carried off by the past.
She knew that there were all kinds of ways to make a conquest and that one of the surest roads to a woman’s genitals was through her sadness.
Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short.
When we want to give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives, we tend to use metaphors of heaviness. We say that something has become a great burden to us. We either bear the burden or fail and go down with it, we struggle with it, win or lose. And Sabina – what had come over her? Nothing. She had left a man because she felt like leaving him. Had he persecuted her? Had he tried to take revenge on her? No. Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden, but the unbearable lightness of being.