Immortality Quotes
"Thanks to the radio I can savor drowsing and waking, that marvelous swinging between wakefulness and sleep which in itself is enough to keep us from regretting our birth."
"The most delightful moment of the day: thanks to the radio I can savor drowsing and waking, that marvelous swinging between wakefulness and sleep."
"A harmonious combination of uniformity and freedom—what more could mankind ask?"
"Let our vices be compared to thunderstorms, tornadoes, hurricanes!"
"A gesture is more individual than an individual."
"It is gestures that use us as their instruments, as their bearers and incarnations."
"Without the faith that our face expresses our self, we cannot live."
"I cannot hate them because nothing binds me to them; I have nothing in common with them."
"Life has changed into one vast orgy in which everyone takes part."
"A person no longer belongs to himself but becomes the property of others."
"It is not only possible to declare them impossible, but it is necessary to add that the pictures are ridiculous!"
"You can say what you like about the immortality of poets, but military commanders are even more immortal."
"He therefore decided to lose weight and soon became a slender man."
"Karl August has done a great deal for art and science."
"The theater should become the school of the people!"
"To carry the shield of childhood in front of her: that was her lifelong ruse."
"He clasped her hands and lifted her from the floor."
"A child can do whatever it likes, for it is innocent and inexperienced."
"Some one hundred years ago in Russia, persecuted Marxists began to gather secretly in small circles in order to study Marx’s manifesto."
"Imagology is stronger than reality, which has anyway long ceased to be what it was for my grandmother."
"Public opinion polls are a parliament in permanent session, whose function it is to create truth."
"Ideologies fought with one another, and each of them was capable of filling a whole epoch with its thinking."
"The word 'change' no longer means a new stage of coherent development, but a shift from one side to another."
"All ideologies have been defeated: in the end their dogmas were unmasked as illusions."
"For the first time in her life, Laura had a man younger than herself, for the first time Bernard had a woman older than himself."
"The desire for love the right to love, the desire for rest the right to rest, the desire for happiness the right to happiness."
"Because for me that’s the only real life: to live in the thoughts of another."
"Either life gives me everything, or I’ll quit."
"To be absolutely modern means in such a case to identify absolutely with one’s daughter."
"Fame adds a hundredfold echo to everything that happens to us."
"The fight for is always connected with the fight against, and the preposition 'for' is always forgotten in the course of the fight in favor of the preposition 'against'."
"For Bettina history meant an incarnation of God."
"The gestures of Laura and Bettina are identical, and there is certainly some connection between Laura’s desire to help distant blacks and Bettina’s attempt to save a condemned Pole."
"World history, with its revolutions, utopias, hopes, and despair, had vanished from Europe, leaving only nostalgia behind."
"The gesture of longing for immortality knows only two points in space: the self here, the horizon far in the distance."
"The basis of the self is not thought but suffering, which is the most fundamental of all feelings."
"An actor playing the role of old King Lear stands on the stage and faces the audience full of the real sadness of betrayal."
"The novel is consumed in the fire of its own tension like a bale of straw."
"Cars have made the former beauty of cities invisible."
"The church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés has disappeared and all the churches in towns have disappeared in the same way, like the moon when it enters an eclipse."
"At first I used to jog without it, too. This is a refinement I developed only after a few years, and it wasn’t so much a practical need that led me to it as a kind of purely aesthetic, almost impractical longing for perfection."
"No episode is a priori condemned to remain an episode forever, for every event, no matter how trivial, conceals within itself the possibility of sooner or later becoming the cause of other events and thus changing into a story or an adventure."
"The only thing in his mind was the painful thought that in a few minutes he would leave the café and lose this woman forever."
"What is unbearable in life is not being but being one's self."
"Life does not resemble a picaresque novel in which from one chapter to the next the hero is continually being surprised by new events that have no common denominator. It resembles a composition that musicians call a theme with variations."
"The grammatical tense of their obscene dreams was the future: next time you will do this or that, we will stage such and such a situation."
"The inertia of the everyday keeps him on the rails of life."
"The majority of episodes never explode, but the most unremarkable of them may someday turn into a story that will prove fateful to you."
"No matter how we define love, the definition will always suggest that love is something substantial, that it turns life into fate."
"The highest morality consists in being useless."
"The experience of Telephone changed him: he was losing the feeling that the act of physical love is a moment of absolute intimacy."
"Every time he immersed himself in the stream he experienced the feeling of merging with God in a kind of mystic rite."
"Shame means that we resist what we desire and feel ashamed that we desire what we resist."
"Because we ourselves don’t know what is important and what isn’t, we accept as important whatever is accepted by others."
"He was eager to say something, something outrageous that would break her composure, but he knew he couldn’t bring himself to do it."
"He would no longer yearn for new women; he would yearn only for women he had already had; from now on, his longing would be an obsession with the past."
"Perhaps if he had corresponded with them more often their names might have stuck in his memory because he would have had to write them on envelopes."
"He admitted (not without some embarrassment) that women had meant nothing to him except as erotic experiences."
"Strangely enough, he could still hear this laugh but could recall nothing of the lovemaking."
"A strange thing: what stuck in his memory was the fiancé and nothing else."
"In comparison, how poor were Rubens’s achievements!"
"All this time he had been coddling himself with the certainty that he had a rich life behind him."
"Memory does not make films, it makes photographs."
"Whatever was willed, intentional, ostentatious, planned in his erotic life lost value."
"Woman is the future of man or mankind will perish, because only woman is capable of nourishing within her an unsubstantiated hope."