The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories rewritten.
The meaning did not precede the dream; the dream preceded the meaning. So the way to read the tale is to let the imagination carry one along. Not, above all, as a rebus to be decoded.
By writing books, a man turns into a universe.
This reconciliation with Hitler reveals the profound moral perversity of a world that rests essentially on the nonexistence of return, for in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted.
Human lives are conmposed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of an individual’s life.
First he sympathized with Cuba, then with China, and when the cruelty of their regimes began to appall him, he resigned himself with a sigh to a sea of words with no weight and no resemblance to life.
Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.
On the surface, there was always an impeccably realistic world, but underneath, behind the backdrop’s cracked canvas, lurked something different, something mysterious or abstract.
A scarf from her dress works free and floats behind her the way memories float behind the dead.
A young woman forced to keep drunks supplied with beer and siblings with clean underwear -instead of being allowed to pursue “something higher”- stores up great reserves of vitality, a vitality never dreamed of by university students yawning over their books.
Co-incidencia significa que dos acontecimientos inesperados ocurren al mismo tiempo, que se encuentran.
If I imagine the genesis of a novelist in the form of an exemplary tale, a “myth,” that genesis looks to me like a conversion story: Saul becoming Paul; the novelist being born from the ruins of his lyrical world.
But no carnival can go on for ever.
It was as though she has found refuge inside a shell and the only sound she could hear was the sea of an inimical world.
Einmal ist keinmal. What happens but once might as well not have happened at all.
No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.
Tomas lived under the hypnotic spell cast by the excruciating beauty of Tereza’s dreams.
Extremele marcheaza frontierele in spatele carora viata inceteaza, iar pasiunea extremismului, in arta si in politica, este dorinta camuflata de a muri.
Before long, unfortunately, she began to be jealous herself, and Tomas saw her jealousy not as a Nobel Prize, but as a burden, a burden he would be saddled with until not long before his death.
That’s how it is: even in the throes of death, man is always on stage. And even ‘the plainest’ of them, the least exhibitionist, because it’s not always the man himself who climbs on stage. If he doesn’t do it, someone will put him there. That is his fate as a man.