If excitement is a mechanism our Creator uses for His own amusement, love is something that belongs to us alone and enables us to flee the Creator. Love is our freedom. Love lies beyond “Es Muss sein!
Leroy interrupted Chantal’s fantasies: “Freedom? As you live our your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom. You’re free to melt your own individuality into the cauldron of the multitude either with a feeling of defeat or euphoria.
Tereza had gone back to sleep; he could not. He pictured her death. She was dead and having terrible nightmares; but because she was dead, he was unable to wake her from them. Yes, that is death: Tereza asleep, having terrible nightmares, and he unable to wake her.
There are things that can be accomplished only by violence. Physical love is unthinkable without violence.
She fixed him with a long careful, searching stare that was not devoid of irony’s intelligent sparkle.
A man may ask anything of a woman, but unless he wishes to behave like a brute, he must make it possible for her to act in harmony with her deepest self-deceptions.
What is flirtation? One might say that it is behavior leading another to believe that sexual intimacy is possible, while preventing that possibility from becoming a certainty. In other words, flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee.
The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but that this humiliation is seen by everyone.
If he invited her to come, then come she would, and offer him up her life.
Even painful memories are ties that bind.
We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?
He who gives himself up like a prisoner of war must give up his weapons as well. And deprived in advance of defense against a possible blow, he cannot help wondering when the blow will fall.
If a mother was Sacrifice personified, then a daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redress.
It takes so little, a tiny puff of air, for things to shift imperceptibly and whatever it was that a man was ready to lay down his life for a few seconds earlier, seems suddenly to be sheer nonsense.
It means what you are, wanting what you want and going after it without a sens od shame. People are slaves to rules.
From childhood, she had regarded books as the emblems of a secret brotherhood.
What we have not chosen we cannot consider either to our merit or our failure.
If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.
Lucie had been many things to me: a child, a source of comfort, a balm, an escape from myself; she was literaly everything for me but a woman.
He was down and out, the Catholics took him in, and before he knew it, he had faith. So it was gratitude that decided the issue, most likely. Human decisions are terribly simple.