Quote collection
410 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Fortunately, I read (the books) without knowing what I was in for, and the best thing that can ever happen to a reader happened to me: I loved something that, by conviction (or by my nature) I should not have loved"
"The ludicrous element in our feeling does not make them any less authentic."
"Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding."
"Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love."
"Yes, it's a well-known fact about you: you're like death, you take everything."
"Mankind's real moral test, a test so radical and so deep that it escapes our gaze, is probably the one of its relations with those that are the most at its mercy; the Animals."
"Children, Never look Back!" and this meant that we must never allow the future to be weighed down by memory . for children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles."
"Art arises from sources other than logic." (p.32)"
"Why don't you ever use your strength on me?" she said. Because love means renouncing strength," said Franz softly."
"The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented."
"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"
"I cannot hate them because nothing binds me to them; I have nothing in common with them."
"I have to lie, if I don't want to take madmen seriously and become a madman myself"
"Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious."
"There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting."
"Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors."
"Remembering now all those farewells (fake farewells, worked-up farewells), Irena thinks: a person who messes up her goodbyes shouldn’t expect much from her re-unions."
"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)."
"Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry."
"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."