The Invention Of Solitude Quotes
"In searching out the truth be ready for the unexpected, for it is difficult to find and puzzling when you find it." — Heraclitus
"Death after a long illness we can accept with resignation. Even accidental death we can ascribe to fate. But for a man to die of no apparent cause, for a man to die simply because he is a man, brings us so close to the invisible boundary between life and death that we no longer know which side we are on."
"I could not muster a single ennobling thought."
"The realization that my father had left no traces."
"He had no wife, no family that depended on him, no one whose life would be altered by his absence."
"Devoid of passion, either for a thing, a person, or an idea, incapable or unwilling to reveal himself under any circumstances, he had managed to keep himself at a distance from life."
"For fifteen years he had lived alone. Doggedly, opaquely, as if immune to the world."
"He was not there. In the deepest, most unalterable sense, he was an invisible man."
"Death takes a man’s body away from him. In life, a man and his body are synonymous; in death, there is the man and there is his body."
"Discovering these photographs was important to me because they seemed to reaffirm my father’s physical presence in the world, to give me the illusion that he was still there."
"It is not presumptuous of me to speak? And yet: if there had been anything more than silence, would I have felt the need to speak in the first place?"
"Like everyone else, I feel the need of family and friendship, affection and friendly intercourse. I am not made of stone or iron, like a hydrant or a lamp-post." — Van Gogh
"Work was the name of the country he lived in, and he was one of its greatest patriots."
"Having money means more than being able to buy things: it means that the world need never affect you."
"If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, binding me and nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds?"
"Memory as a place, as a building, as a sequence of columns, cornices, porticoes."
"The power of memory is prodigious, it is a vast, immeasurable sanctuary."
"When the father dies, the son becomes his own father and his own son."
"It may be that a better way to conquer time and the world is to pass, and not to leave a trace."
"All the unhappiness of man stems from one thing only: that he is incapable of staying quietly in his room."
"Pretty impressive, eh? This guy will take good care of me."
"I feel good about all this, doctor. I know you're going to get me better again."
"So I can entertain the nurses, in case things get dull."
"The illusion had to be maintained that the old man was coming back."
"Until there was death, there was always the possibility there would not be death."
"In the heart of life, that finally taught him the thing he had known all along."
"It will only be after our death that he will be dead."
"The voice sounded strange to A. The boy seemed to be short of breath."
"Merely to have contemplated the possibility of the boy's death was enough for him to treat the boy's recovery as a sort of resurrection."
"For the first time in all their years together, he had turned against her."
"No—I will not give up nothingness father—I feel nothingness invade me."
"Memory was the only thing keeping him alive."
"He thrived on bluff, the symbolic gesture, on being the life of the party."
"To be alone and not alone at the same moment."
"To write down every word discovered in the space of memory."
"If a man says to you, 'I'm going to Jerusalem,' you think to yourself: how nice, he's going to Jerusalem."
"An uncanny experience occurs either when repressed infantile complexes have been revived by some impression, or when the primitive beliefs we have surmounted seem once more to be confirmed."
"Speak or die. And for as long as you go on speaking, you will not die."
"Marry me to this king, for either I will be the means of the deliverance of the daughters of the Muslims from slaughter, or I will die and perish as others have perished."
"By Allah, I will not kill her, till I hear the rest of the story."
"For this is the function of the story: to make a man see the thing before his eyes by holding up another thing to view."
"It is said that a man would go mad if he could not dream at night."
"The thought of a child’s suffering, therefore, is monstrous to him."
"It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out."
"Life can last so long. How hard and long for each of us to die alone."