• 99 — charles baudelaire paris spleen
  • ⤹ ★★★★★

but what's an eternity of damnation to one who has found in such an instant infinite satisfaction?

it is not given to everyone to blend into the multitude: enjoying the crowd is an art, and only he can gain a stroke of vitality from it. at humanity's expense, whose good fairy at his cradle bequeathed a taste for travesty and masque, along with hatred of home and passion for travel. multitude, solitude: equal and convertible terms for the active and productive poet. those who cannot people their solitude can never be alone in a busy crowd.

your hair contains a dream, complete with mast and sals, contains the open sea where a monsoon hurtles me towards clement weather, space deeper and bluer, an atmosphere redolent of fruit, of folage, of human skin.

"i had today, in dream, three dwellings i found equally pleasant. why force my body to change places, since my soul travels so lightly? and what good would it do to execute such plans, since planning is in itself sufficient enjoyment?"

the eyes of the poor.

"yes, you are right; no pleasure can be sweeter than a man's surprise, getting more than he hoped for."

and i lay me down, proud to have lived and suffered in other than myself. perhaps you will ask me, "are you sure this legend is true?" what do i care about the reality of things outside me, if it helps me to live, to feel that i am and what i am?

moon favors.

the life is a hospital, where each patient is possessed by the desire to change beds. that one prefers to suffer nearer the stove and this one believes he would get well next to the window. to me it seems always it would be well for me to be somewhere i am not, and the question of moving is one that my soul and i discuss endlessly.

• 100 — milan kundera identity
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

"i wanted to see your eyelid washing your cornea like a wiper washing a windshield."

"everything changed when i met you. not because my little jobs became more exciting. but because everything that happens around me i turn into fodder for our conversations."

• 101 — eliza clark boy parts
  • ⤹ ★☆☆☆☆

'she still had an aragorn poster while we were in college.'

• 102 — simone de beauvoir the woman destroyed
  • ⤹ ★★★★☆

"that's the great thing about writing," i said. "pictures lose their shape; their colors fade. but words you carry away with you."

when one has lived so much for others it is quite hard to turn oneself back again - to live for oneself. i must not plunge into the pitfall of devotion - i know very well that the words give and receive are interchangeable ... "you're wonderful," maurice used to say to me - he used to say it to me so often, on one pretext or another - "because giving others pleasure is in the first place a pleasure to you," i would laugh. "yes, it's a form of selfishness." that tenderness in his eyes "the most enchanting form there is."

i tell myself that over and over again. and sometimes i think myself sensible and sometimes i accuse myself of cowardice. in fact i am defenseless because i have never supposed i had any rights. i expect a lot of the people i love - too much, perhaps. i expect a lot, and i even ask for it. but i do not know how to insist.

usually i am not afraid of being alone. indeed, in small doses, i find it a relief - the presence of people i love overburdens my heart, i grow anxious about a wrinkle or a yawn. and so not to be a nuisance - or absurd - i have to bottle up my anxieties, rein back my impulses. the times when i think of them from a distance are restful breaks.

"she's the kind of person who never stops to look at a sunset."

"other people's loves are never comprehensible."

• 103 — franz kafka the trial
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆
• 104 — anais nin the diary of anais nin, vol 1: 1931-1934
  • ⤹ ★★★★☆

ordinary life does not interest me. i seek only the high moments. i am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous.

films are like a dose of opium, then as you come out in the street it's a shock and you are brutally awakened from your dream. but when you stay, you never wake up. the dream goes on working.

why cannot i express the fundamental me? i play roles too. why should i care? but i do care. i care about everything. emotionalism and sensibility are my quicksands.

"but to be unhappy is not a sign of weakness! what i felt was sympathy, and that is the way i treat all my friend. it is when they are in trouble that my tenderness is aroused."

"that is wrong, june. as soon as a woman has creativity, imagination, or plays an active role in life, people say: masculinity. allendy does not call it that. you are active. henry is passive."

"i don't want worship. i want understanding."

"i love your silences," he said, "they are like mine."

is there much darkness in him as in me? how desperately he seeks the sun, beauty, harmony. to heal himself, to keep his balance.

i do not think i am looking for a man, but for a god. i am beginning to feel a void which must be the absence of god. i have called for a father, a guide, a leader, a protector, a friend, a lover, but i still miss something: it must be god. but i want a god in the flesh, not an abstraction, an incarnated god, with strength, two arms, and a sex.

as he can only love what is like himself, he will love, in me, only what resembles him, not our differences.

there were always, in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning, and another who only wanted to bring beauty, grace and aliverness to people and who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curioisty, enthusiasm, interest.

the possibility of happiness through ordinary definitions of happiness can never satisfy you because your desires are not on the average level. the identification with the whole can only come when the individual has lived out the utmost of his aspirations and is at peace with himself.

"that's too bad. i thought we were above questions of good and evil. i am not saying you are bad. that does not concern me. i am only saying that you are false with me. i have too much intuition."

i have an immense hunger for life. i would like to be in so many places. i would like to be traveling and roaming and vagabonding. i would like to be writing. i would like to be dancing somewhere in the south ... i would like to go to zurich and seduce jung. i would like to meet the whole world at once.

• 105 — charles bukowski ham on rye
  • ⤹ ★★☆☆☆

"you'll never be a writer if you hide from reality." "what are you talking about? that's what writers do."

• 106 — jessica jung shine
  • ⤹ ★☆☆☆☆

"sorry, rachel, what you need now is tough love. not klaus-and-caroline shipping emotional therapy."

• 107 — marcel proust the guermantes way
  • ⤹ ★★★★☆

i felt a discouragement that was all the more profound in that, if the object of my headstrong and active desire no longer existed, the same tendencies, on the other hand, to indulge in a perpetual dream, which varied from year to year but led me always to sudden impulses, regardless of danger, still persisted.

we have brought to it the ideas of 'beauty,' 'breadth of style,' 'pathos' and so forth which we might, failing anything better, have had the illusion of discovering in the commonplace show of a 'correct' face or talent, but our critical spirit has before it the insistent challenge of a form of which it possesses no intellectual equivalent, in which it must detect and isolate the unknown element. it hears a shrill sound, an oddly interrogative intonation. it asks itself: "is that good? is what i am feeling just now admiration? is that richness of colouring, nobility, strength?" and what answers it again is a shrill voice, a curiously questioning tone, the despotic impression caused by a person whom one does not know, wholly material, in which there is no room left for 'breadth of interpretation.

i realised that it is not only the material world that is different from the aspect in which we see it; that all reality is perhaps equally dissimilar from what we think ourselves to be directly perceiving; that the trees, the sun and the sky would not be the same as what we see if they were apprehended by creatures having eyes differently constituted from ours, or, better still, endowed for that purpose with organs other than eyes which would furnish trees and sky and sun with equivalents, though not visual.

and perhaps the resurrection of the soul after death is to be conceived as a phenomenon of memory.

"and as an idea," i went on, "is a thing that cannot participate in human interests and would be incapable of deriving any benefit from the, the men who are governed by an idea are not influenced by material considerations.

there were evenings when, as i passed through the town on my way to the restaurant, i felt so keen a longing for mme. de guermantes that i could scarcely breathe; you might have said that part of my breast had been cut open by a skilled anatomist, taken out, and replaced by an equal part of immaterial suffering, by an equivalent load of longing and love. and however neatly the wound may have been stitched together, there is not much comfort in life when regret for the loss of another person is substituted for one's entrails, it seems to be occupying more room than they, one feels it perpetually, and besides, what a contradiction in terms to be obliged to think a part of one's body.

we do not change; we introduce into the feeling with which we regard a person many slumbering elements which that feeling revives but which are foreign to it. besides, with these feelings for particular people, there is always something in us that is trying to bring them nearer to the truth, that is to say, to absorb them in a more general feeling, common to the whole of humanity, with which people and the suffering that they cause us are merely a means to enable us to communicate.

we answer readily enough for other people when, setting our mental stage with the little puppets that represent them, we manipulate these to suit our fancy. no doubt even then we take into account the difficulties due to another person's nature being different from our own, and we do not fail to have recourse to some plan of action likely to influence that nature, an appeal to his material interest, persuasion, the rousing of emotion, which will neutralise contrary tendencies on his part. but these differences from our own nature, it is still our own nature that is imagining them, these difficulties, it is we that are raising them; these compelling motives, it is we that are applying them. and so with the actions which before our mind's eye we have made the other person rehearse, and which make him act as we choose; when we wish to see him perform them in real life, the case is altered, we come up against unseen resistances which may prove insuperable.

similarly, one new year's afternoon, as night fell, standing before a column of playbills, i had discovered the illusion that lies in our thinking that certain solemn holidays differ essentially from the other days in the calendar.

"all the same, don't you know, it is amazing to me that a man can find any attraction in a person who's simply silly."

there are maladies which we must not seek to cure because they alone protect us from others that are more serious.

it is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognise that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.

he prided himself on not sharing the mania of the others without thinking that he had also one of his own, and that it was this which saved him from the other. you must not be offended by the comparison, madame, for the man who dared not turn his neck for fear of catching a chill is the greatest poet of our day. that poor maniac is the most lofty intellect that i know. submit to being called a neurotic. you belong to that splendid and pitiable family which is the salt of the earth. all the greatest things we know have come to us from neurotics. it is they and they only who have founded religions and created great works of art. never will the world be conscious of how much it owes to them, nor above all of what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it. we enjoy fine music, beautiful pictures, a thousand exquisite things, but we do not know what they cost those who wrought them in sleeplessness, tears, spasmodic laughter, rashes, asthma, epilepsy a terror of death which is worse than any of these, and which you perhaps have felt, madame.

the person whom we press for an answer, whom we suspect of being about to play us false, is life itself, and although we feel her to be no longer the same we believe in her still or at least remain undecided until the day on which she finally abandons us.

in the lives of most women, everything, even the greatest sorrow, resolves itself into a question of 'trying-on.'

my part is played, sir, i will simply add these few words. another person will perhaps some day offer you his affection, as i have done. ket the present example serve for your instruction. do not neglect it. affection is always precious. what one cannot do by oneself in this life, because there are things which one cannot ask, nor do, nor wish, nor learn by oneself, one can do in company, and without needing to be thirteen, as in balzac's story, or four, as in the three musketeers. goodbye.

• 108 — mona awad bunny
  • ⤹ ★★★★☆

you're too crushed and obsessed about being poor to have always been poor, she said, leaning back in her chair like she should know.

"your beauty is nuanced and labyrunthine like a sentence by proust."

"being with you," he says to ava, "is like being in literature. i have no idea where you'll lead me next. but i'm excited. my life could change. and i'm not alone anymore."

• 109 — milan kundera a ignorância
  • ⤹ ★★★★☆

a frase de amor mais comovente em tcheco: styska se mi po tobe: sinto nostalgia de você; não posso suportar a dor da sua ausência.

pois a nostalgia não intensifica a atividade da memória, não estimula as lembranças, ela basta a si mesma, à sua própria emoção, tão totalmente absorvida por seu próprio sofrimento.

"porque nós corrigimos os nossos sentimentos quando os sentimentos se enganam. se a história os desacredita."

é preciso compreender o paradoxo matemático da nostalgia: ela é mais poderosa na primeira juventude, quando o volume da vida passada é inteiramente insignificante.

a noção de amor (de grande amor, amor único) provavelmente nasceu, ela também, dos limites estreitos do tempo que nos foi dado.

imagino a emoção de dois seres que se reencontram depois de muitos anos. outrora se frequentavam e portanto pensavam que estavam ligados pelas mesmas lembranças. as mesmas lembranças? é aqui que começa o mal-entendido: eles não têm as mesmas recordações; ambos retêm do passado duas ou três pequenas situações, mas cada um retêm as suas; suas lembranças não se parecem; não se encontram; e, mesmo quantitativamente, não são comparáveis: um se lembra do outro mais do que este se lembra dele; primeiro porque a capacidade da memória de cada um difere de um indivíduo para outro (o que ainda seria uma explicação aceitável para cada um deles), e também (e é mais penoso admitir isso) porque eles não têm, um para o outro, a mesma importância.

aquele que não soube dar adeus não pode esperar grande coisa de seus reencontros.

"claro que não! mas quando as pessoas se vêem sempre achama que se conhecem. não fazem perguntas e não ficam frustradas. não se interessam umas pelas outras, mas com toda a inocência. nem percebem o que acontece."

• 110 — virginia woolf cenas londrinas
  • ⤹ ★★★★☆

o encanto da londres moderna é ser construída não para durar, é ser construída para passar.

a verdade é que não desejava intimidade, desejava conversa. a intimidade é um dos caminhos para o silêncio, e mrs. crowe abominava o silêncio.

• 111 — jane austen persuasion
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

"my idea of good company, mr. elliot, is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation; that is what i call good company."

she was persuaded that any tolerably pleasing young woman who had listened and seemed to feel for him, would have received the same compliment. he had an affectionate heart. he must love somebody.

but when pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure.

men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands.

i can listen no longer in silence. i must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. you pierce my soul. i am half agony, half hope. tell me not that i am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. i offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own, than when you almost broke it eight years and a half ago. dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. i have loved none but you. unjust i may have been, weak and resentful i have been, but never inconstant.

he enquired after you very particularly; asked even if you were personally altered, little suspecting that to my eye you could never alter.

it was, perhaps, one of those cases in which advice is good or bad only as the event decides; and for myself, i certainly never should, in any circumstance of tolerable similarity, give such advice.

• 112 — stephenie meyer midnight sun
  • ⤹ ★★☆☆☆

and then there were the eyes, too big for her face, brimming over with silent secrets...

"no blood, no foul," i said wryly. without thinking, i smiled too widely at my private joke.

my life was an uneding, unchanging midnight. it must, by necessity, always be midnight for me. so how was it possible that the sun was rising now, in the middle of my midnight?

it was bad enough that i was afraid to go kneel beside her bed so that i could read the titles of her books. i wanted to know the stories in her head.

but the sun seemed to make her happy, so i could not resent it too much.

"while you consider that, tell me what your favorite scent is." "lavender. or... maybe clean laundry."

• 113 — kate elizabeth russell my dark vanessa
  • ⤹ ★★★★☆

your life is like a movie. she didn’t understand the horror of watching your body star in something your mind didn’t agree to. she meant it as a compliment. isn’t that what all teenage girls want? endlessly bored, aching for an audience.

• 114 — charles bukowski post office
  • ⤹ ★☆☆☆☆
• 115 — milan kundera slowness
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

the dancer wants to look more moral because his big audience is naive and considers moral acts beautiful. but our little audience is perverse and likes amorality. so you used amoral judo on me, and that in no way contradicts your essential nature as a dancer.

conversation is not a pastime; on the contrary, conversation is what organizes time, governs it, and imposes its own laws, which must be respected.

there is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. consider this utterly commonplace situation: a man is walking down the street. at a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. automatically, he slows down. meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time.

our period is given over to the demon of speed, and that is the reason it so easily forgets its own self. now i would reverse that statement and say: our period is obsessed by the desire to forget, and it is to fulfill that desire that it gives over to the demon of speed; it picks up the pace to show us that it no longer wishes to be remembered; that it is tired of itself; sick of itself; that it wants to blow out the tiny trembling flame of memory.