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.
In spite of their love, they had made each other’s life a hell.
Turning points in the evolution of a relationship are not always the result of dramatic events; they often stem from something that at first seems completely inconsequential.
How can she explain to Gustaf that within the magic circle of maternal energy, Irena has never manage to rule over her own life? How can she explain that the constant proximity of the mother would throw her back, into her weakness, her immaturity?
El amor es el deseo de encontrar a la mitad perdida de nosotros mismos.
Not everything written on Kafka is Kafkology. How then to define Kafkology? By a tautology: Kafkology is discourse for Kafkologizing Kafka. For replacing Kafka with the Kafkologized Kafka.
The young can’t help playacting; themselves incomplete, they are thrust by life into a completed world where they are compelled to act fully grown. They therefore adopt forms, patterns, models – those that are in fashion, that suit, that please – and enact them.
A value debased and an illusion unmasked have the same pitiful shell.
And that was exactly her gamble: that they’d accept her as the person she is now, coming back. She left here as a a naive young woman, and she has come back mature, with a life behind her, a difficult life that she’s proud of. She means to do all she can to get them to accept her with her experiences of the past twenty years, with her convictions, her ideas; it’ll be double or nothing: either she succeeds in being among them as the person she has become, or else she won’t stay.