Great Throughts Treasury

"The moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul; the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice."

"The moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies."

"The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it."

"The novel was born with the Modern Era, which made man, to quote Heidegger, the only real subject, the ground for everything. It is largely through the novel that man as an individual was established on the European scene. Away from the novel, in our real lives, we know very little about our parents as they were before our birth; we have only fragmentary knowledge of the people close to us: we see them come and go and scarcely have they vanished than their place is taken over by others: they form a long line of replaceable beings. Only the novel separates out an individual, trains a light on his biography, his ideas, his feelings, makes him irreplaceable: makes him the center of everything."

"The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters."

"The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead."

"The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become."

"The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories rewritten."

"The novel's spirit is the spirit of complexity. . . . The novel's spirit is the spirit of continuity . . . a thing made to last, to connect the past with the future."

"The old duality of body and soul has become shrouded in scientific terminology, and we can laugh at it as merely an obsolete prejudice. But just make someone who has fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science, instantly fades away."

"The old gentleman is easily identified by the fact that the praise suffered the pains and makes them into a museum that invites its guests."

"The only relationship that can make both partners happy is one in which sentimentality has no place and neither partner makes any claim on the life and freedom of the other."

"The ostriches were like messengers who had learned their vital message by heart, but whose vocal chords had been slit by the enemy, so that when they finally reached their goal, all they could do was move their mouths."

"The only thing they bequeathed to him was a fear of women. Tomas desired but feared them. Needing to create a compromise between fear and desire, he devised what he called ?erotic friendship.? He would tell his mistresses: the only relationship that can make both partners happy is the one in which sentimentality has no place and neither partner makes any claim on the life and freedom of the other."

"The passion for knowledge when the novelist is not aimed at politics nor history. What the new feature can be found by about the events described in the discussion and thousands of books discreet diverse?"

"The pain is not very heaviest of the pain that we suffer with the other and for the other, and in the other place, the pain compounded imagination and hundreds of resonances."

"The pressure to make public retractions of past statements - there's something medieval about it. What does it mean, anyway, to 'retract' what you've said? How can anyone state categorically that a thought he once had is no longer valid? In modern times an idea can be refuted, yes, but not retracted."

"The phrase It's absolutely the same with me, I... seems to be an approving echo, a way of continuing the other's thought, but that is an illusion: in reality it is a brute revolt against a brutal violence, an effort to free our own ear from bondage and to occupy the enemy's ear by force. Because all of man's life among his kind is nothing other than a battle to seize the ear of others."

"The passion of extremism, whether in art or in politics compelling desire to die."

"The proliferation of mass graphomania among politicians, cab drivers, women on the delivery table, mistresses, murderers, criminals, prostitutes, police chiefs, doctors, and patients proves to me that every individual without exception bears a potential writer within himself and that all mankind has every right to rush out into the streets with a cry of "We are all writers!""

"The psychological and physiological mechanism of love is so complex that at a certain period in his life a young man must concentrate all his energy on coming to grips with it, and in this way he misses the actual content of the love: the woman he loves. (In this he is much like a young violinist who cannot concentrate on the emotional content of a piece until the technique required to play it comes automatically.)"

"The profile of our pain is not heavier than the pain that we suffer with the other and to the other and in the other place; pain compounded imagination and categories and resonances."

"The purpose of the poetry is not to dazzle us with an astonishing thought, but to make one moment of existence unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia."

"The reason is that everyone has trouble accepting the fact that he will disappear unheard of and unnoticed in an indifferent universe, and everyone wants to make himself into a universe of words before it's too late."

"The reason claimed to dominate the future, having the power to change history is nothing else."

"The religion of orgasm: utilitarianism projected into sex life; efficiency versus indolence; coition reduced to an obstacle to be got past as quickly as possible in order to reach an ecstatic explosion, the only true goal of love-making and of the universe."

"The same filmmaker subconscious that day sent him pieces of his native landscape as images of happiness, you organized the night, terrifying return to their country. The day was enlightened by the beauty of the abandoned country, the terror of the night there again. The phy showed him the paradise lost, the night of hell where he had fled."

"The shame does not merit a mistake of ours committed, but the humiliation we feel to be what we are without having selected and unbearable feeling that this humiliation is seen everywhere."

"The reign of imagology begins where history ends."

"The river flowed from century to century, and human affairs play themselves out on its banks. Play themselves out to be forgotten the next day, while the river flows on."

"The senator had only one argument in his favor: his feeling. When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme."

"The simplest questions are always the most important questions and the answer is no, and the question cannot be answered obstacle that cannot go beyond that."

"The sadness meant: we are at the last station. The happiness meant: we are together. The sadness was form, the happiness content"

"The situation has changed, and the understanding of journalists to ask questions not only a way to work Maker reportage, which tracks humbly investigating what clutching in his hand, but a way of exercising power really, not the journalist is to ask a question, it is a person who has the sacred right to put them, and put them on any was, and about any subject. Authority and not doing the right journalist asking the question, but the right to claim with an answer."

"The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness, that delectable trance of happiness, that ultimate peak of delight. Laughter of delight, delight of laughter. There is no doubt: this laughter goes far beyond joking, jeering, and ridicule. The two sisters stretched out on their bed are not laughing at anything concrete, their laughter has no object; it is an expression of being rejoicing at being... and in this ecstatic laughter he loses all memory, all desire, cries out to the immediate present of the world, and needs no other knowledge."

"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

"The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything....The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place."

"The time of man is not circling round, and rode in a straight line forward. And here lies the reason a person cannot achieve happiness, because happiness is the longing for repetition."

"The time of life became for him a mere obstacle to be overcome at increasing speeds."

"The Transformation of music into noise was a planetary process by which mankind was entering the historical phase of total ugliness. The total ugliness to come had made itself felt first as omnipresent acoustical ugliness: cars, motorcycles, electric guitars, drills, loudspeakers, sirens. The omnipresence of visual ugliness would soon follow."

"The true goodness of man can occur freely and in all purity in respect of those who pose no strength. The real (the most radical, which is at a level that escapes our gaze) moral test of humanity is its relationship with those who are his thank you and the animals. And it is here that occurred the greatest defeat of man, fundamental debacle which all others arise."

"The termites of reduction have always gnawed away at life: even the greatest love ends up as a skeleton of feeble memories."

"The trap of hatred?"

"The uniqueness of the ego lies precisely in this part of the difficult to imagine which is owned by every man"

"The woman he had loved most (he was thirty at the time) would tell him (he was nearly in despair when he heard it) that she held on to life by a thread. Yes, she did want to live, life gave her great joy, but she also knew that her 'i want to live' was spun from the threads of a spider-web. It takes so little, so infinitely little, for someone to find himself on the other side of the border, where everything-- love, convictions, faith, history -- no longer has meaning. The whole mystery of human life resides in the fact that it is spent in the immediate proximity of, and even in direct contact with, that border, that it is separated from it not by kilometers but by barely a millimeter."

"The uniqueness of the ?I? lies precisely in what is unimaginable in man. We are only able to imagine what is the same in all people, usually. The I individual is something that differs from the general, that is what cannot be guessed and calculated in advance what the other is necessary to discover, reveal, conquer."

"The war found me in Germany. Woman I loved then, hand me over to the Gestapo. Went to her and showed my picture with another woman. This makes it insulted, and you know how often love taking images of hatred. I went to jail with the special feeling that there sending me love. Is not it wonderful to find yourself in the hands of the Gestapo and to know that actually it is the privilege of those who too was loved!"

"The word change, so dear to our Europe, has been given a new meaning: it no longer means a new stage of coherent development (as it was understood by Vico, Hegel or Marx), but a shift from one side to another, from front to back, from the back to the left, from the left to the front (as understood by designers dreaming up the fashion for the next season)."

"The woman we love ought to swim as slowly as we do, she ought to have no past of her own to look back on happily. But when the illusion of absolute identity vanishes (the girl looks back happily on her past or swims faster), love becomes a permanent source of the great torment we call litost."

"The world has become man's right and everything in it has become a right: the desire for love the right to love, the desire for rest the right to rest, the desire for friendship the right to friendship, the desire to exceed the speed limit the right to exceed the speed limit, the desire for happiness the right to happiness, the desire to publish a book the right to publish a book, the desire to shout in the street in the middle of the night the right to shout in the street."