The moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful.
If every life is unique, let’s live uniquely. Let’s reject everything that is not fresh and new. It is necessary to be absolutely modern.
Human life is bounded by two chasms: fanaticism on one side, absolute skepticism on the other.
He had spent seven years of his life with Tereza, and now he realized that those years were more attractive in retrospect than they were when he was living them.
What drove such people to their sinister occupations? Spite? Certainly, but also the desire for order. Because the desire for order tries to transform the human world into an inorganic reign in which everything goes well, everything functions as a subject of an impersonal will. The desire for order is at the same time a desire for death, because life is a perpetual violation of order. Or, inversely, the desire for order is a virtuous pretext by which man’s hatred for man justifies its crimes.
If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross.
Is it right to raise one’s voice when others are being silenced? Yes.
A sudden happiness, a feeling of bliss, the joy that came of freedom and a new life – these were the gifts she had left him.
People fascinated by the idea of progress never suspect that every step forward is also a step on the way to the end and that behind all the joyous ‘onward and upward’ slogans lurks the lascivious voice of death urging us to make haste.
She refused at first, saying it would make a mockery of their love. She loved him too much to admit that what she thought of as unforgettable could ever be forgotten. Finally, of course, she did as he asked, but without enthusiasm. The notebooks showed it: they had many empty pages, and the entries were fragmentary.
She desired her own body, newly discovered, intimate and alien beyond all others, incomparably exciting.
How would I explain to him that I couldn’t make peace with him? How would I explain that if I did I would immediately lose my inner balance? How would I explain that one of the arms of my internal scales would suddenly shoot upward? How would I explain that my hatred of him counterbalanced the weight of evil that had fallen on my youth? How would I explain that he embodied all the evils in my life? How would I explain to him that I needed to hate him?
A person’s destiny often ends before his death.
How defenceless we are in the face of flattery!
Internal imperatives are all the more powerful and therefore all the more of an inducement to revolt.
In death, Franz at last belonged to his wife. He belonged to her as he had never belonged to her before. Marie-Claude took care of everything: she saw to the funeral, sent out announcements, bought the wreaths, and had a black dress made – a wedding dress, in reality. Yes, a husband’s funeral is a wife’s true wedding! The climax of her life’s work! The reward of her sufferings!
The novelist destroys the house of his life and uses its stones to build the house of his novel.
And he reflected that one cannot completely become his own self until one is completely among others.
He felt responsible for his fate, but his fate felt no responsibility for him.
You must understand that by this time the only choice was among several varieties of defeat, but the town in question rejected compromise and would settle for nothing but victory. That was not reason talking; that was the voice of litost!