Laughable Loves Quotes
"We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing."
"Publishing the essay hadn’t been so easy—what I’d written was polemical and controversial."
"But now, at home, when it was approaching midnight and the bottle was nearly empty, I took it off the table to amuse us."
"Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has."
"It was a collection of platitudes jumbled together with no sense of continuity and without the least intention of advancing through them some original thought."
"Every human life has many aspects. The past of each one of us can be just as easily arranged into the biography of a beloved statesman as into that of a criminal."
"Political rhetoric and sophistries do not exist, after all, in order to be believed; rather, they serve as a common and agreed-upon alibi."
"I knew that I was not to be caught. I lived undercover all the time."
"I was afraid that one day he would come to me, unhappy and with a heavy heart, and ask me to send the young lady away for the sake of his good name."
"How can you imagine that someone can live with you like this? Do you think that your house is a brothel?"
"Fortunately she had the miraculous ability to change the meaning of her actions after the event."
"Childish desires withstand all the snares of the adult mind and often survive into ripe old age."
"The moment she stopped seeing the gallantly seductive young man beside her and saw only his inaccessible face, her jealousy subsided."
"Everything was permitted her; she could say, do, and feel whatever she liked."
"The scarcity of summer accommodations in our country had compelled him to book a room in the Tatras six months in advance."
"Elisabet’s backside, covered with the white material of a nurse’s apron, circled around the room like a beautifully round sun."
"He knew that the game was over, but he didn’t feel like returning to their customary relationship; he feared this return."
"But in the realm of the Great Collector, nothing’s impossible, because it is the realm of death."
"The death that has been given him as a present; splendid and comforting death."
"He appreciated the comic aspects of these thoughts, and he knew that he would never carry them out."
"Every year? This statement saddened him, and once again he thought of the spitefulness of fate."
"Yes, she had decreed beauty for herself, as people decree moral injunctions for themselves."
"The thoughts made themselves felt within him perhaps as the overwhelming desire to give up the race makes itself felt within a marathon runner."
"He also considered his race lost, and he didn’t feel like running any farther."
"She remembered how he had looked then (he was twenty, didn’t know how to dress, used to blush, and his boyishness amused her)."
"She drank her coffee and talked. He tried hard to determine precisely the extent of the transformation by means of which she was escaping him for the second time."
"In him pity was mixed with anger, and he felt like drowning their too-long-put-off meeting in alcohol."
"He started to talk (and it did indeed turn into a long talk) and eventually he got to the pessimistic thoughts that had visited him of late."
"I don’t like that kind of talk," she said almost vehemently. "Everything you’ve been saying is awfully superficial."
"The pride of being on the correct side of the front lines."
"Everything is pure to the man who is pure at heart."
"I don’t want us to do anything we shouldn’t do."
"A man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously!"