Quote collection
410 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assassination of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the war in the Sinai Desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai, and so on and so forth until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten."
"At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love."
"Immortality is a ridiculous illusion, an empty word, a butterfly net chasing the wind."
"We are born one time only, we can never start a new life equipped with the experience we've gained from the previous one. We leave childhood without knowing what youth is, we marry without knowing what it is to be married, and even when we enter old age, we don't know what it is we're heading for: the old are innocent children innocent of thier old age. In that sense, man's world is the planet of inexperience."
"No one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll; only an animal can do so, because only animals were not expelled from Paradise. The love between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no hair-raising scenes; it knows no development."
"Man reckons with immortality, and forgets to reckon with death."
"...she merely wished to find a way out of the maze. She knew that she had become a burden to him: she took things too seriously, turning everything into a tragedy, and failed to grasp the lightness and amusing insignificance of physical love. How she wished she could learn lightness! She yearned for someone to help her out of her anachronistic shell."
"Tereza knew what happens during 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."
"Ah, ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously."
"...in our time art is encrusted with a noisy, opaque, logorrhea of theory that prevents a work from coming into direct, media free, non-interpreted contact with its viewer (its reader, its listener)"
"To ensure that the self doesn't shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends."
"La memoria no guarda películas, guarda fotografías."
"People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone."
"Those boobs of yours are ubiquitous - like God!"
"Since the insignificance of all things is our lot, we should not bear it as an affliction but learn to enjoy it."
"Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor"
"Mysticism and exaggeration go together. A mystic must not fear ridicule if he is to push all the way to the limits of humility or the limits of delight."
"A man who loses his privacy loses everything. And a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster."
"For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words."
"Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all."