Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Merely by being born intelligent, you right away find yourself in absolute exile.
Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality.
I have to lie, if I don't want to take madmen seriously and become a madman myself
No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.
...[P]eople who shout joy from the rooftops are often the saddest of all... (p.24)
I feel a frantic desire to free myself. To start all over again and in another way.
In eroticism as dance: one of the partners is always charged with leading the other.
Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.
To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.
But what had happened, had happened, and it was no longer possible to right anything.
Immortality is a ridiculous illusion, an empty word, a butterfly net chasing the wind.
He Kept recalling her lying on his bed; she reminded him of no one in his former life.
In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.
Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.
I think, therefore I am' is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.
I cannot hate them because nothing binds me to them; I have nothing in common with them.
But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33)
So she stood naked in front of the young man and at this moment stopped playing the game.
Even in the game there lurks a lack of freedom; even in a game is a trap for the players.
loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.
I understood that there was no escaping the memories, that I was surround by them. (p.30)
The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters.
The moment Kafka attracts more attenetion than Joseph K., Kafka's posthumous death begins.
Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.
The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.
But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.
Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought.
Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray.
Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being.
You can't measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange.
In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions.
Kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.
"Pick me up," is the message of a person who keeps falling. Tomas kept picking her up, patiently.
Ah, ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously.
Disgust at having to talk about oneself is what distinguishes novelistic talent from lyric talent.
In the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.
No act is of itself either good or bad. Only its place in the order of things makes it good or bad.
Fortunately women have the miraculous ability to change the meaning of their actions after the event.
In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.
Forgive me," he went on. "For a long time I have had the peculiar habit of not arriving but appearing.
The beauty of New York is unintentional; it arose independent of human design, like a stalagmite cavern.
The combination of a frivolous form and a serious subject immediately unmasks the truth about our dramas.
The novel is a territory where one does not make assertions; it is a territory of play and of hypotheses.
Fidelity gives a unity to lives that would otherwise splinter into thousands of split-second impressions.
A man who loses his privacy loses everything. And a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster.
Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.
Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence.
There are things that can be accomplished only by violence. Physical love is unthinkable without violence.
For the body is temporal and thought is eternal and the shimmering essence of flame is an image of thought.
Radio... force-feeds us music... everywhere and all the time... sewage-water music in which music is dying.