For a man who finds life tolerable only by staying on the surface of himself, it is natural to be satisfied with offering no more than this surface to others.
My true place in the world, it turned out, was somewhere beyond myself, and if that place was inside me, it was also unlocatable. This was the tiny hole between self and not-self, and for the first time in my life I saw this nowhere as the exact center of the world.
It was filled with books. That was the first thing I noticed when I went in – how many books there were. Three of the four walls were lined with shelves from the floor to the ceiling, and every inch of those shelves was crammed with books. There were further clusters and piles of them on chairs and tables, on the rug, on the desk. Hardcovers and paperbacks, new books and old books.
If it still shocks me to report what happened, that is because the real is always ahead of what we can imagine. No matter how wild we think our inventions might be, they can never match the unpredictability of what the real world continually spews forth. This lesson seems inescapable to me now. Anything can happen. And one way or another, it always does.
Impossible, I realize, to enter another’s solitude. If it is true that we can ever come to know another human being, even to a small degree, it is only to the extent that he is willing to make himself known.
When he talks about the world, then, he is referring to his world, to the small, circumscribed sphere of his own life, and not to the world-at-large, which is too large and too broken for him to have any effect on it.
There’s progress for you. A bigger and better mousetrap every month. Pretty soon, we’ll all be able to kill all the mice at the same time.
Please, go ahead and improve society if you can, but meanwhile people are suffering, and I have a job to do.
There it was: a full confession. Sherlock Holmes had done it again, and as I marveled at my devastating powers of deduction, I wished there had been two of me so I could have patted myself on the back. I know it sounds arrogant, but how often does one achieve a mental triumph of that magnitude? After listening to her speak just two words, I had nailed the whole bloody thing. If Watson had been there, he would have been shaking his head and muttering under his breath.
This came as a revelation, and when I finally had time to absorb it, I wondered how I had managed to live so long without learning this simple thing. I am not talking about desire so much as knowledge, the discovery that two people, through desire, can create a thing more powerful than either of them can create alone. This knowledge changed me, I think, and actually made me feel more human. By belonging to Sophie, I began to feel as though I belonged to everyone else as well.
A good sense of humor, then, a taste for the ironies of life, and an appreciation of the absurd.
When a man feels he has come to the end of his rope, it is perfectly natural that he should want to scream.
The mind cannot win over matter, for once the mind is asked to do too much, it quickly shows itself to be matter as well.
I was twelve years old the first time I walked on water. The man in the black clothes taught me how to do it, and I’m not going to pretend I learned that trick overnight.
Knowledge comes slowly, and when it comes, it is often at great personal expense.
Find yourself drowning in a sea of trouble, and hard work can become the raft that ends up keeping you afloat.
Las historias sin final no pueden hacer otra cosa que continuar eternamente...
All the happiness of man stems from one thing only: that he is incapable of staying quietly in his room.
No, there is nothing people will not do, and the sooner you learn that, the better off you will be.
In the streets, everything is bodies and commotion, and like it or not, you cannot enter them without adhering to a rigid protocol of behavior. To walk among the crowd means never going faster than anyone else, never lagging behind your neighbor, never doing anything to disrupt the flow of human traffic. If you play by the rules of this game, people will tend to ignore you.