The difference between the English and the rest of mankind is that the English have long known the truth about themselves – which makes them always able to evade it discreetly, to slip round it.
A man lives on hope. He keeps thinking things will somehow straighten themselves out.
I love you’, she said, to remind me that there was one answer to everything, and only one.
After all, when no name springs spontaneously to mind, when you have to rummage in your address book for someone to invite, it is always best to give up trying, if only out of regard for the very concept of friendship.
Perhaps, there was something missing in me, a lack of empathy without which even love and happiness are merely a part of that struggle toward championship.
The mythology of the superstud... ′ my friend, the poet Henti Drouille, had written on a slip of paper before putting a bullet in his head. His mistress cried out to me: ‘I don’t understand – I don’t understand! He was such a marvelous lover!’ True enough, so marvelous that she had noticed nothing. I saw in my mind the virile mask of Jim Daley and seemed to hear his voice saying: ‘She was probably the clitoral type. Sometimes, a man gets a break this way.’ No, one has to know when to stop.
I experienced so intense a moment of despair, frustration and rebelliousness that irony, my most trusted weapon of defense, became instead another scalpel for probing my own wounds.
Bruno, someday you will die of kindness, tolerance and gentleness. Well, given the options, it isn’t a bad way to go.
It’s a bad break, staying so young at heart.
You can say anything you like about life, but one thing is certain: life doesn’t give a damn. It has never made any clear distinction between happiness and misery. It simply doesn’t watch where it’s going.
There are those who have said about us, “What does she see in him?” or “What does he see in her?”; the usual sort of thing that only proves two people indeed see everything in each other.
The pristine vision of childhood restores freshness to even the most time-worn scenes, and in Laura’s company I recovered some of the delights I had experienced years ago when my son was a little boy.
And I found myself falling off asleep, because in that half-awake state, one’s sensibilities are blunted and happiness can still hover nearby...
Of course it’s always possible to gain time, put up a front, try to last it out – how long, a year, eighteen months? I’d rather leave the arena before I am beaten to a pulp and have to be dragged out. One has to know how to accept the inevitable.
She must have said to herself that one can always rely on a gentleman when it’s a question of not understanding a woman.
Slowly I felt flooded with that agonizing and poignant confusion that surely comes to all aging men experiencing their first adolescent love. I had no great wish to go on living; what was the point of a flawed happiness. According to Bonnard, the hardest moment of all is when the artist longs to keep on but he’s conscience tells him that one brushstroke more will spoil the entire painting. And man has to know when to stop.
Humor is a silent and polite dynamite which enables you to blow your own way of life sky-high every time you have had enough of it, yet with the maximum discretion and without making a mess.
That night I hardly slept a wink, but turned over and over in my tent; never until then had I felt so alone or so deserted. Perhaps even the elephants are too small, I thought, as I stared into the darkness, and we need a far bigger and more affectionate presence at our side.
I too have often felt the need to understand it all; but I know my limits. In my life I’ve done more suffering than thinking – though I believe one understands better that way.
My hints had, undoubtedly and unintentionally, made her feel insecure, guilty, inadequate, afraid that she was losing whatever it was that turned me on; in short, it aroused all the self-doubt so readily awakened in women after thousands of years of servitude. Hence my zeal in denying the effects of time was abetted by Laura’s complicity.
Racism is when it doesn’t count. When they don’t count. When one can do anything with them, it doesn’t matter what, because they are not people like us. Do you see? Not our kind. When we can make use of them as we please, without losing face, dignity, honor. Without embarrassment, without making a moral judgement – that’s it. When we can make them do no matter what degrading work, service, because their opinion of us doesn’t count, because it cannot tarnish us. That’s what racism is.