He was like a husband so jealous that he insists his wife have the very dreams he has.
Those who lack imagination have no choice but to base their conclusions on the reality they see around them. But on the other hand, those who are imaginative have a tendency to build fortified castles they have designed themselves, and to seal off every window in them.
For everything sacred has the substance of dreams and memories, and so we experience the miracle of what is separated from us by time or distance suddenly being made tangible.
A man may be hard to persuade by rational argument while he is easily swayed by a display of passion, even if it is feigned.
Energy is good; lethargy is evil.
Once I had started my solitude I realised anew that it was easy for me to become accustomed to this state and that the most effortless existence for me was in fact one in which I was not obliged to speak to anyone. My fretful attitude to life left me. Each dead day had its charm.
In general, things that were endowed with life did not, like the Golden Temple, have the rigid quality of existing once and for all. Human beings were merely allotted one part of nature’s various attributes and, by an effective method of substitution, they diffused that part and made it multiply.
For even in the triviality of a single playing card missing from a deck, the world’s order is inevitably turned awry.
I think it’s a wonderful song,” she said. But she was only shielding his pride, he knew. Obviously this was the first time she had ever heard the song, though she pretended to know it well. She can’t penetrate to the feelings deep down in a song like this; or see through the murk of my manhood to the longing that sometimes makes me weep; fair enough: then as far as I’m concerned, she’s just another body.
Il sole del pomeriggio batteva senza sosta la superficie del mare, e tutta la baia er a un’unica, stupenda distesa di fulgore. All’orizzonte campeggiavano alcune nuvole estive, ferme nel silenzio, immergendo parzialmente in acqua le forme sontuose, funeree, profetiche. I muscoli delle nuvole erano pallidi come alabastro.
How alike were the voices of pleasure and death!
I longed for the great sense of relief that death would surely bring if only, like a wrestler, I could wrench the heavy weight of life from my shoulders.
The law is an accumulation of tireless attempts to block a man’s desire to change life into an instant of poetry. Certainly it would not be right to let everybody exchange his life for a line of poetry written with a splash of blood. But the mass of men, lacking valor, pass away their lives without ever feeling the least touch of such a desire.
Thus in a single phrase I can define the great illusion concerning ‘love’ in this world. It is the effort to join reality with the apparition. Presently I came to realize that my conviction – the conviction that I could never be loved-was itself the basic state of human existence.
Beings in existence thus are annihilated from moment to moment, and this gives rise to time. The process whereby time is engendered by this moment-to-moment annihilation may be likened to a row of dots and a line.
In modern society the meaning of death is constantly being forgotten. No, it is not forgotten; rather, the subject is avoided.
Longing at eighteen for an early demise, I felt myself unfitted for it. I lacked, in short, the muscles suitable for a dramatic death. And it deeply offended my romantic pride that it should be this unsuitability that had permitted me to survive the war.
Those words of my friend were like fertilizer poured over the poisonous weed of an idea deeply planted in me.
He never made fun of her as her neighbors did. That was why she visited him. He felt in this mad, ugly woman five years his senior a comrade in apartness. He liked people who refused to recognize the world.
Because in the pupils of his eyes there lingered the mysterious and eternal horizon that the sea leaves as a keepsake deep in the eyes of all who are born at the seaside and forced to depart from it.