Two silent time zones had now merged to form the standard time of one man’s fate; and it is not impossible that the poet in New Wye and the thug in New York awoke that morning at the same crushed beat of their Timekeeper’s stopwatch.
I esteem my colleagues as I do my own self, I esteem them for two things: because they are able to find perfect felicity in specialized knowledge and because they are not apt to commit physical murder.
Being a murderer with a sensational but incomplete and unorthodox memory, I cannot tell you, ladies and gentlemen, the exact day which I first knew with certainty that the red convertible was following us.
Light in comparison with darkness is a void.
There is only one school: that of talent.
My solemn exasperation was to her the silence of love.
I wandered through various public rooms, glory below, gloom above: for the look of lust always is gloomy; lust is never quite sure – even when the velvety victim is locked up in one’s dungeon – that some rival devil or influential god may still not abolish one’s prepared triumph.
To be quite candid – and what I am going to say now is something I have never said before, and I hope that it provokes a salutary chill – I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.
In fact I believe that one day a reappraiser will come and declare that, far from having been a frivolous firebird, I was a rigid moralist: kicking sin, cuffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel – and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent and pride.
We live in a stocking which is in the process of being turned inside out, without our ever knowing for sure to what phase of the process our moment of consciousness corresponds.
Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the anonymous roller that pressed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life’s foolscap.
Let me repeat with quite force: I was, and still am, despite mes malheurs, an exceptionally handsome male; slow moving tall, with dark soft hair and a gloomy but all the more seductive cast of demeanour.
The pale organisms of literary heroes feeding under the author’s supervision swell gradually with the reader’s lifeblood; so that the genius of a writer consists in giving them the faculty to adapt themselves to that – not very appetizing – food and thrive on it, sometimes for centuries.
In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.
What are these hopes, and who is this savior?” “Imagination,” replied Cincinnatus.
I am here through an error – not in this prison, specifically – but in this whole terrible, striped world;.
Ah, gentle drivers gliding through summer’s black nights, what frolics, what twists of lust, you might see from your impeccable highways if Kumfy Kabins were suddenly drained of their pigments and became as transparent as boxes of glass!
To each, or about each, of his colleagues he had said at one time or other, something... something impossible to recall in this or that case and difficult to define in general terms – some careless bright and harsh trifle that had grazed a stretch of raw flesh.
Paduk and all the rest wrote on steadily, but Krug’s failure was complete, a baffling and hideous disaster, for he had been busy becoming an elderly man instead of learning the simple but now unobtainable passages which they, mere boys, had memorized.
Actually, observed Lucette, wiping the long envelope which a drop of soda had stained,- Bergson is only for very young people or very unhappy people, such as this available rousse.