The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.
You and I are enough to break anyone’s heart – how can we not break our own?
That Sunday, from six o’clock in the evening, it was a Viennese orchestra that played.
What’s in your mind, I suppose, is, why should you rise to occasions when I don’t? Let’s face it – who ever is adequate? We all create situations each other can’t live up to, then break our hearts at them because they don’t.
Did Anna also, sometimes not know what to do next? Because she knew what to do next, because she knew what to laugh at, what to say, did it always follow that she knew where to turn? Inside everyone, is there an anxious person who stands to hesitate in an empty room?
There must be perfect towns where shadows were strong like buildings, towns secret without coldness, unaware without indifference.
If one didn’t let oneself swallow some few lies, I don’t know how one would ever carry the past.
The place gave out a look of hollow desuetude, as though its desertion would last forever.
Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave a little, even if one did once know what one meant.
The happy passive nature, locked up with itself like a mirror in an airy room, reflects what goes on but demands not to be approached. A pact with life, a pact of immunity, appears to exist-But this pact is not respected for ever- a street accident, an overheard quarrel, a certain note in a voice, a face coming too close, a tree being blown down, someone’s unjust fate- the peace tears right across.
There were readers who could expect no more from life, and just dared to look in books to see how much they had missed.
There are still places I cannot walk past, though we only walked here those two days. When I walk I look for places we did not go.
I wonder where father’s gone. He repeatedly goes out but never comes in.
Frantic smiles at parties, overtures that have desperation behind them, miasmic reaches of talk with the lost bore, short cuts to approach through staring, squeezing or kissing all indicate that one cannot live alone. Not only is there no question of solitude, but in the long run we may not choose our company.
You agonise me by being so agonised.
While I stand and regard it, the indifference to myself shown by a work of art in itself is art.
Society was self-interest given a pretty gloss.
We observe small rites, but we defend ourselves against that terrible memory that is stronger than will. We defend ourselves from the rooms, the scenes, the objects that make for hallucination, that make the senses start up and fasten upon a ghost. We desert those who desert us; we cannot afford to suffer; we must live how we can.
One does not go into the world and come home the same: isolation has altered its nature when one returns.
But I should never write what had happened down. One’s nature is to forget, and one ought to go by that. Memory is quite unbearable enough, but even so it leaves out quite a lot. It wouldn’t let one down as gently.
It’s not just that we are incurious; we completely lack any sense of each other’s existences.