Great Throughts Treasury

"I have no mission. No one has."

"I have to lie, if I don't want to take madmen seriously and become a madman myself."

"I know, brother, that you are a straightforward man, and that you pride yourself on it. But put one question to yourself: why in fact should one tell the truth? What obliges us to do it? And why do we consider telling the truth a virtue? Imagine that you meet a madman, who claims that he is a fish and that we are all fish. Are you going to argue with him? Are you going to undress in front of him and show him that you don't have fins? Are you going to say to his face what you think? Well, tell me!' His brother was silent and Edward went on: 'If you told him the whole truth and nothing but the truth, only what you really thought, you would enter into a serious conversation with a madman and you yourself would become mad. And it is the same way with the world that surrounds us. If I obstinately told a man the truth to his face, it would mean I was taking him seriously. And to take something so unimportant seriously means to become less than serious oneself. I, you see, must lie, if I don't want to take madmen seriously and become one of them myself."

"I imagine the feelings of two people meeting again after many years. In the past they spent some time together, and therefore they think they are linked by the same experience, the same recollections. The same recollections? That's where the misunderstanding starts: they don't have the same recollections; each of them retains two or three small scenes from the past, but each has his own; their recollections are not similar; they don't intersect; and even in terms of quantity they are not comparable: one person remembers the other more than he is remembered; first because memory capacity varies among individuals (an explanation that each of them would at least find acceptable), but also (and this is more painful to admit) because they don't hold the same importance for each other. When Irena saw Josef at the airport, she remembered every detail of their long-ago adventure; Josef remembered nothing. From the very first moment their encounter was based on an unjust and revolting inequality."

"I invent stories, confront one with another, and by this means I ask questions. The stupidity of people comes from having an answer to everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything."

"I loved her so much I couldn't conceive of ever parting from her; true, we never talked about marriage, but at least was absolutely serious about marrying her one day."

"I never tire of criticizing those who distort the past, rewrite, which falsify, exaggerate the importance of an event or silent other, these criticisms are justified (cannot not be), but are irrelevant if they are not preceded by a review most elementary: because criticism of human memory as such. Because the poor what can she really do? The past is only able to retain a miserable lot, no one will know why exactly that and nothing else, because that choice is made ??mysteriously in each of us beyond our control and our interests. We do not understand anything in human life if we persist in palming the first of all the evidence: a reality, as it was, is no longer, your refund is impossible."

"I looked at her; I saw a slipshod permanent crumpling her hair into a shapeless mass of curls; I saw a brown overcoat, pitifully threadbare and a bit too shot; I saw a face both unobtrusively attractive and attractively unobtrusive; I sensed in this young woman tranquility, simplicity and modesty, and I felt that these were qualities I needed; moreover, it seemed to me that we were very much akin: all I had to do was to go up and start talking to her and she would smile as if a long-lost brother had suddenly appeared before her."

"I lie in bed, immersed in the sleepy sweetness. At six in the first phase of slight revival, stretching out his hand toward the small transistor beside my pillow and press the button. We hear the first news of the morning... barely manage to distinguish words and fall asleep again, in this way the announcer phrases turns dreams. It's the most beautiful phase of sleep, the most charming of the day: radio due to my incessant savor taste Falling asleep and waking - the sublime swing between sleeping and waking state, which in itself, constitute a sufficient reason for a man not regret to be born."

"I remember my childhood. I sat at the piano and enjoy passionate improvisations, which were enough a chord in C minor and F minor subdominant, playing fortissimo indefinitely. Endlessly repeated two chords and primitive melodic motif evokes in me a violent emotion, as no Chopin, Beethoven no not elicit later (once my father who was a musician, came running into my room mad - I've never seen him so mad, either before nor afterwards - lifted me from the stool and brought me into the dining room and with ill-concealed disgust put me under the table)."

"I ran after that voice through the streets so as not to lose sight of the splendid wreath of bodies gliding over the city, and I realized with anguish in my heart that they were flying like birds and I was falling like a stone, that they had wings and I would never have any."

"I sometimes have the feeling that her entire life was merely a continuation of her mother's, much as the course of a ball on the billiard table is merely the continuation of the player's arm movement."

"I still have before my eyes Teresa, sitting on a stump, stroking Karenin's head and thinking about the debacle of humanity. At that time I remember another image: Nietzsche leaving his hotel in Turin sees before him a horse and the coachman who punishes him with the whip. Nietzsche goes to the horse and, in the eyes of the coachman, hugs his neck and cries. This happened in 1889, when Nietzsche had already people out. Put another way: it was precisely then that his mental illness appeared. But precisely why I think his gesture has a broader meaning. Nietzsche was to apologize to the horse for Descartes. His madness (i.e., his break with mankind) began at the time weeping for the horse. And that is the Nietzsche I want, as I want to Teresa, on whose knees rests the head of a mortally ill dog. I see the two together: both depart from the road which humanity, loves and owner of nature, march forward."

"I remember that the day I finished 'The Angels,' part three of 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting', I was terribly proud of myself. I was sure that I had discovered the key to a new way of putting together a narrative."

"I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be."

"I thought the Queen of England and sister-she said to herself that the camera solved at the present time place the eye of God. Eye and one eye replaced by everyone. Life turned to one party romp and wide participation of everyone. Everyone can see the princess of England is celebrating her birthday naked on a tropical beach. Shows that the imaging device is only interested in famous people, but it is enough that the plane crashed near you, to rise from the flames, until you become too famous to a party promiscuity general have nothing to do with joy but which officially announces that he is no longer able to hide in a anywhere, and that each one is at the mercy of everyone"

"I understood that there was no escaping the memories, that I was surround by them."

"I understand you, and I shall not attempt to make you change your mind. I am too old to want to improve the world. I have told you what I think, and that is all. I shall remain your friend even if you act contrary to my convictions, and I shall help you even if I disagree with you."

"I want you to be old. Ten years older. Twenty years older!"

"I want you to be weak. As weak as I am."

"I wanted to do something to make you stay no longer escape. I wanted to brutally destroy all the past of their last seven years. We rose. The intoxicating, the insuperable desire to fall."

"I wanted to see if sadness, on which the powerful ideologue claimed that is unhealthy and harmful, could give me, with your line, some joy (because in my situation, I could hardly find the joy in joy)."

"I was completely enclosed in itself and in its suffering. Could out of its closure at least the vision of our suffering? No. Because the suffering of others happened in a world that had gotten out of hand, that it was not his."

"I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn't know who I was or wanted to be."

"I would say that the amount of boredom, if boredom can be measured today is much higher than once. For the former occupation, at least in large part, would have been unthinkable without the passionate commitment: peasants in love with his country, my grandfather, the wizard of beautiful tables; shoemakers knew by heart the foot of his fellow villagers, foresters, gardeners, then I suppose we are even soldiers killed with passion . The question of the meaning of life is not raised, it is quite natural to them, in their workshops, their fields. Each create their own way of thinking, their own way of being. The doctor is thinking differently from the peasants, soldiers behaved differently from teachers. Today, we are all equal, united by a common indifference to their work. This indifference has become a passion. One great collective passion of our time."

"If a dancer has the opportunity to enter the political game, he refused all ostensibly secret negotiations (which have always been the playground of real politics) in denouncing them as false, dishonest, hypocritical, dirty, he will advance proposals publicly, on a stage, singing, dancing, and namely call others to follow in his action, I insist not discreetly (to give each other time to think, discuss counterproposals) but publicly, and if possible by surprise: Are you ready now (like me) to give up your salary for the month of March for the children of Somalia? Surprised, people have only two possibilities: either refuse and thus discredit as enemies of children, or say yes in a terrible embarrassment that the camera will show maliciously."

"I was prey to the fear, the fear of this horizon motivation to please. And I felt my Spirit involve themselves, Ahsha retreat, and I was frightened by the idea that he did not stay in front of her only escape this blockade."

"If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi's shoulders."

"If God's masons built real walls, I doubt we'd be able to destroy them. But instead of walls all I see is backdrops, sets. And sets are made to be destroyed."

"If hatred strikes you, if you get accused, thrown to the lions, you can expect one of two reactions from people who know you: some of them will join in the kill, the others will discreetly pretend to know nothing, hear nothing, so you can go right on seeing them and talking to them. That second category, discreet and tactful, those are your friends. 'Friends' in the modern sense of the term. Listen, Jean-Marc, I've known that forever."

"If a mother was Sacrifice personified, then a daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redress."

"If people were only responsible for what we do consciously, idiots would advance free of any guilt."

"If rejection and privilege are one and the same, if there is no difference between the sublime and the paltry, if Son of God can undergo judgment of shit, then human existence loses its dimensions and becomes unbearable light."

"If he invited her to come, then come she would, and offer him up her life."

"If I hadn't met you, I'd certainly have fallen in love with him."

"If high culture is coming to an end, it is also the end of you and your paradoxical ideas, because paradox as such belongs to high culture and not to childish prattle. You remind me of the young men who supported the Nazis or communists not out of cowardice or out of opportunism but out of an excess of intelligence. For nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought? You are the brilliant ally of your own gravediggers. In the world of highways, a beautiful landscape means: an island of beauty connected by a long line with other islands of beauty. How to live in a world with which you disagree? How to live with people when you neither share their suffering nor their joys? When you know that you don?t belong among them?"

"If I imagine the genesis of a novelist in the form of an exemplary tale, a myth, that genesis looks to me like a conversion story: Saul becoming Paul; the novelist being born from the ruins of his lyrical world."

"If I had two lives, in one life I could invite her to stay at my place, and in the second life I could kick her out. Then I could compare and see which had been the best thing to do. But we only live once. Life's so light. Like an outline we can't ever fill in or correct... make any better. It's frightening."

"If it were possible to raise the penis by means of a simple command, then sexual excitement would have no place in the world."

"If Karenin was a man, not a dog, long ago had said Teresa, Look, is not nice to wear nsyaka morning bread in his mouth. Could not you I think of something new? This sentence contains all doom of mankind. The time of man is not circling round and racing in a straight line forward. And here lies the reason a person cannot achieve happiness, because happiness is the longing for repetition."

"If in the past people would listen to music out of love for music, nowadays it roars everywhere and all the time, regardless whether we want to hear it, it roars from loudspeakers, in cars, in restaurants, in elevators, in the streets, in waiting rooms, in gyms, in the earpieces of Walkmans, music rewritten, re-orchestrated, abridged, and stretched out, fragments of rock, of jazz, of opera, a flood of everything jumbled together so that we don't know who composed it (music become noise is anonymous), so that we can't tell beginning from end (music become noise has no form): sewage-water music in which music is dying."

"In all of us there is a part that continues beyond the time of their lives. Perhaps only certain times that we are aware of his age and often are no age."

"If the extent of the French Revolution to be repeated constantly, to the French historians Brobbspier less pride. But what they are talking about something that will not be back again, the bloody years become mere words, theories and arguments; become more lightness of lint and no longer hidden. There is a vast difference between Robespierre, who did not appear only once in history and Robespierre who returns permanently to cut off the heads of the French."

"I'm under water and the beating of my heart circles occur on the surface."

"If you're not ambitious and hungry for success and recognition here're on the verge of collapse."

"If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all."

"In a society run by terror, no statements whatsoever can be taken seriously."

"In eloquent, these dreams were beautiful. This is an aspect that escaped Freud in his theory of dreams... The dream is proof that imagining, dreaming of what happens, is one of the deepest needs of man."

"If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and make it the object of our game; to turn it into a toy."

"If you do not disappear conjures up memories and once again the talk of friends."