Entangled and besotted as he was, he no longer wished for anything else than to pursue the beloved object that inflamed him, to dream about him when he was absent and to speak amorous phrases, after the manner of lovers, to his mere shadow.
It was simply that the mechanical laws found themselves repeated and corroborated in nature.
Literature is the union of suffering with the instinct for form.
One can say that he consumed one whole week waiting for the return of that single hour every seven days – and waiting means racing ahead, means seeing time and the present not as a gift, but as a barrier, denying and negating their value, vaulting over them in your mind. Waiting, people say, is boring. But in actuality, it can just as easily be diverting, because it devours quantities of time without our ever experiencing or using them for their own sake.
For he was by nature and temperament passive, could sit without occupation hours on end, and loved, as we know, to see time spacious before him.
Wrapped in his coat, a book in his lap, the traveler took his ease, the hours slipping by unnoticed.
We shall tell it at length, in precise and thorough detail – for when was a story short on diversion or long on boredom simply because of the time and space required for the telling?
But the disease makes him ailing within and fevered without; disease makes men more physical, it leaves them nothing but body.
The child of civilization, remote from birth from wild nature and all her ways, is more susceptible to her grandeur than is her untutored son who has looked at her and lived close to her from childhood up, on terms of prosaic familiarity. The.
To feel stirring within you the wonderful and melancholy play of strange forces and to be aware that those others you yearn for are blithely inaccessible to all that moves you – what a pain is this! And yet! He stood there aloof and alone, staring hopelessly at a drawn blind and making, in his distraction, as though he could look out. But yet he was happy. For he lived. His heart was full...
Yet he received this love with joy, surrendered himself to it, and cherished it with all the strength of his being; for he knew that love made one vital and rich, and he longed to be vital and rich, far more than he did to work tranquilly on anything to give it permanent form.
And both together, love-worthy and life-worthy, made up the true nobility.
Now I know that it is not out of our single souls we dream. We dream anonymously and communally, if each after his fashion. The great soul of which we are a part may dream through us, in our manner of dreaming, its own secret dreams, of its youth, its hope, its joy and peace – and its blood-sacrifice. Here.
The discipline and elegance, the hushed serenity and intellectual challenge, the well-ordered and well-tended life, the precise yet richly varied schedule – it all spoke to Leo’s profoundest instincts.
Evenings like these bore the joyful promise of a new sunny day of loosely ordered leisure and ornamented with countless and closely packed prospects of pleasant encounters.
He loved the sea and for deep-seated reasons: the hardworking artist’s need for repose, the desire to take shelter from the demanding diversity of phenomena in the bosom of boundless simplicity, a propensity – proscribed and diametrically opposed to his mission in life and for that very reason seductive – a propensity for the unarticulated, the immoderate, the eternal, for nothingness.
All the days are nothing but the same day repeating itself – or rather, since it is always the same day, it is incorrect to speak of repetition; a continuous present, an identity, an everlastingness – such words as these would better convey the idea.
La dicha del escritor es su posibilidad de transformar la idea enteramente en sentimiento; el sentimiento, totalmente en idea.
There are people with whom it is not easy to live, but whom it is impossible to leave.
Death alone can make others respect our sufferings; and through death the most pitiable sufferings acquire dignity.