To take seriously something so unserious means to lose all one’s own seriousness.
Behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil, and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting syllables in unison. p. 100.
Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah, where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear? Where have they gone, those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars?
Too much faith is the worst ally.
When he asked her why she was so silent, she told him she had not been satisfied with their lovemaking. She said he had made love to her like an intellectual.
Her weakness was aggressive and kept forcing him to capitulate until eventually he lost his strength and was transformed into the rabbit in her arms .
The future is only an indifferent void no one cares about.
Every novel says to the reader: “Things are not as simple as you think.” That is the novel’s eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than the question and block it off. In the spirit of our time, it’s either Anna or Karenin who is right, and the ancient wisdom of Cervantes, telling us about the difficulty of knowing and the elusiveness of truth, seems cumbersome and useless.
In a society run by terror, no statements whatsoever can be taken seriously. They are all forced, and it is the duty of every honest man to ignore them.
Man stopped wanting to walk, to walk on his own feet and enjoy it. What’s more he longer saw his own life as a road, but as a highway.
She knew she was acting like the most vulgar of women, the kind that is out to cause pain and knows how.
The mediation of a woman is capable of imposing on hatred certain qualities characteristic of affection, for example curiosity, carnal interest, the urge to cross the threshold of intimacy.
When young people’s education is at stake, compromise is crime.
If I were a doctor, I would diagnose his condition thus: “The patient is suffering from nostalgic insufficiency.
It is entirely possible,” said Tomas, “that a female dog addressed continually by a male name will develop lesbian tendencies.
Kitsch is the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling. It moves us to tears of compassion for ourselves, for the banality of what we think and feel.
Only when a person reaches old age can he stop caring about the opinions of his fellows, or of the public, or of the future.
Oh, all that was so far away, almost forgotten. But during her mother’s five-day stay in Paris, that feeling of inferiority, of weakness, of dependency came over her again.
We wanted to destroy the world. With our messianism we nearly destroyed it. Maybe they with their selfishness will save it.
Irena went to the window to savor the freedom of solitude.