“What is the meaning of life? That was all – a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.”
-Virginia Woolf
Posted in Literature
“Symbols, as we know, are inviolable.”
“While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and exchange motifs, but if they meet when they are older, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.”
“No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Beethoven’s Ninth, Bartok’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, or the Beatles’ White Album?
“The total ugliness to come had made itself felt first as omnipresent acoustical ugliness: cars, motorcycles, electric guitars, drills, loudspeakers, sirens. The omnipresence of visual ugliness would soon follow.”
“Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.”
“Beauty in the European sense had always had a premeditated quality to it. We’ve always had an aesthetic intention and a long range plan. That’s what enabled Western man to spend decades building a Gothic cathedral or a Renaissance piazza. The beauty of New York rests on a completely different base. It’s unintentional. It arose independent of human design, like a stalagmitic cavern. Forms which are in themselves quite ugly turn up fortuitously, without design, in such incredible surroundings that they sparkle with a sudden wondrous poetry.”
“Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.”
“Love means renouncing strength.”
“The moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies.”
“One could betray one’s parents, husband, country, love, but when parents, husband, country, and love were gone – what was left to betray?”
“The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.”
” The only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious. They are the questions with no answers. A question with no answer is the barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.”
“For what made the soul so excited was that the body was acting against its will; the body was betraying it, and the soul was looking on.”
Posted in Literature
“The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.
Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.”
“If we only have one life to live, then we might as well have not lived at all.”
“Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.”
“A long time ago, man would listen in amazement to the sound of regular beats in his chest, never suspecting what they were. He was unable to identify himself with so alien and unfamiliar an object as the body.”
“Just make someone who has fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science, instantly fades away.”
“But is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about?”
“Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us.”
“Necessity knows no magic formulae-they are all left to chance. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi’s shoulders.”
“This symmetrical composition-the same motif appears at the beginning and at the end-may seem quite “novelistic” to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as “fictive,” “fabricated,” and “untrue to life” into the word “novelistic.” Because human lives are composed in precisely such as fashion.”
“Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.”
“It is wrong to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences, but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.”
“Our dreams prove that to imagine-to dream about things that have not happened-is among mankind’s deepest needs.
“If dreams were not beautiful, they would quickly be forgotten.”
“On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, an unintelligible truth.”
“The Russians did not know what to do. They had been carefully briefed about how to behave if someone fired at them or threw stones, but they had received no directives about what to do when someone aimed a lens.”
Posted in Literature
