In the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.
Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.
How goodness heightens beauty!
The rediscovered path, where were left the traces of childhood’s lost steps.
I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be.
Kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.
Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor.
Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events; but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth.
The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.
This is the real and the only reason for friendship: to provide a mirror so the other person can contemplate his image from the past, which, without the eternal blah-blah of memories between pals, would long ago have disappeared.
Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are clearly more complicated.
I have no mission. No one has.
Between the approximation of the idea and the precision of reality there was a small gap of the unimaginable, and it was this hiatus that gave him no rest.
There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize.
The best actors do not let the wheels show.
Dogs are our link to paradise.
The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.
The source of anxiety lies in the future. If you can keep the future out of mind, you can forget your worries.
Common European thought is the fruit of the immense toil of translators. Without translators, Europe would not exist; translators are more important than members of the European Parliament.
Extremism means borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.