But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.
And therein lies the whole of man’s plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.
The more vast the amount of time we’ve left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it.
Seeing is limited by two borders: Strong light, which blinds, and total darkness.
He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him.
Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.
The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.
The combination of a frivolous form and a serious subject immediately unmasks the truth about our dramas.
Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.
All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.
Happiness is the longing for repetition.
Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.
People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they’re going deaf, it has to be played louder still.
You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.
The ludicrous element in our feeling does not make them any less authentic.
Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us.
For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?
For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words.
Necessity knows no magic formulae-they are all left to chance. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi’s shoulders.