Great Throughts Treasury

"Faith is not what I'm talking about. They are images, ideas. No and why would you get rid of them. I would be orphaned without them."

"Fidelity gives a unity to lives that would otherwise splinter into thousands of split-second impressions."

"Flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee."

"For existential mathematics, which does not exist, would probably propose this equation: the value of coincidence equals the degree of its improbability."

"For he was aware of the great secret of life: Women don't look for handsome men. Women look for men who have had beautiful women. Having an ugly mistress is therefore a fatal mistake."

"First he sympathized with Cuba, than with China, and when the cruelty of their regimes began to appall him, he resigned himself with a sigh to a sea of words with no weight and no resemblance to life."

"For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words."

"For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit? In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine."

"For me, however, it seems that instead of walls everywhere I see the scenery. And the destruction of the scenes stuff is good and righteous."

"For Sabina life means seeing. Seeing is limited by two poles: the bright, blinding light and absolute darkness... Extreme highlight boundaries, behind which is the life to an end, and the passion for extremes, in art as in politics, is a veiled longing for death."

"For love, by definition, is an undeserved gift if being loved without merit is precisely the proof of true love. If a woman tells me: love you because you're smart because you are honest because you give me gifts, why are not you in clutch because wash the dishes, I feel disappointed, this love has the air of being interested in anything. It's much nicer to hear: I'm crazy about you despite you not being smart or not serious, and though you are a liar, selfish bastard."

"For the body is temporal and thought is eternal and the shimmering essence of flame is an image of thought."

"For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others was possible only away from the public: 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."

"For the first few seconds, she was afraid he would throw her out because of the crude noises she was making, but then he put his arms around her. She was grateful to him for ignoring her rumbles, and she kissed him passionately, her eyes misting."

"For seven years he had lived bound to her, his every step subject to her scrutiny. She might as well have chained iron balls to his ankles. Suddenly his step was much lighter. He soared. He had entered Parmenides' magic field: he was enjoying the sweet lightness of being."

"For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes."

"Formalism for renovations carried out by the great professors, always, something hidden, and that is a major intonation. Renewal does not seem a tendency to draw attention only when young professors."

"Fortunately women have the miraculous ability to change the meaning of their actions after the event."

"Forgive me, he went on. For a long time I have had the peculiar habit of not arriving but appearing."

"Fortunately, I read (the books) without knowing what I was in for, and the best thing that can ever happen to a reader happened to me: I loved something that, by conviction (or by my nature) I should not have loved."

"Friendship is indispensable to man for the proper function of his memory. Remembering our past, carrying it with us always, may be the necessary requirement for maintaining, as they say, the wholeness of the self. To ensure that the self doesn't shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends. They are our mirror; our memory; we ask nothing of them but that they polish the mirror from time to time so we can look at ourselves in it."

"From childhood, she had regarded books as the emblems of a secret brotherhood."

"From tender youth we are told by father and teacher that betrayal is the most heinous offence imaginable. But what is betrayal? Betrayal means breaking ranks and breaking off into the unknown. Sabina knew of nothing more magnificent than going off into the unknown."

"From day to night, waking from sleep to pass the statue surrounded by living like a bridge slowly overcome the laziness of this morning I'm so in love I say. It took my dreams that night and sleep by an abyss of adventure, the adventure of the day leaving a coincidence that the sudden in and around me, I will be grateful forever monument is a small miracle today."

"From the minute plan maturing and soon swung in front of us in the dusk as a beautiful, mature, shining apple. Allow me with some pomp to call it marten apple of eternal longing."

"From that time on they both looked forward to sleeping together. I might even say that the goal of their lovemaking was not so much pleasure as the sleep that followed it. She especially was affected. Whenever she stayed overnight in her rented room (which quickly became only an alibi for Tomas), she was unable to fall asleep; in his arms she would fall asleep no matter how wrought up she might have been. He would whisper impromptu fairy tales about her, or gibberish, words he repeated monotonously, words soothing or comical, which turned into vague visions lulling her through the first dreams of the night. He had complete control over her sleep: she dozed off at the second he chose."

"Given the nature of the human couple, the love of a man and a woman is a priori inferior to that which can exist (at least in the best instances) in the love between man and dog... It is a completely selfless love."

"From the top of the staircase she sees the London train, modern and elegant, and she tells herself again: Whether it's good luck or bad to be born onto this earth, the best way to spend a life here is to let yourself be carried along, as I am moving at this moment, by a cheerful, noisy crowd moving forward."

"Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors."

"God is the essence, and that Edward has never found anything essential nor loves, nor in his profession or his ideas. It is too honest to admit that he is essentially in the inessential, but it is too low not secretly desire most. Ah, ladies and gentlemen, how sad it is to live when you can take kidney ! seriously, nothing and no one. That's why Edward feels the desire for God, because only God is exempt from the obligation to appear and can just be, for he alone is (alone, unique and non-existent) essential antithesis of what the more existing world that is inessential."

"God being the old man invented in order to, and with whom to, hold long conversations."

"Happiness is the longing for repetition."

"Graphomania (an obsession with writing books) takes on the proportions of a mass epidemic whenever a society develops to the point where it can provide three basic conditions: 1. a high degree of general well-being to enable people to devote their energies to useless activities; 2. an advanced state of social atomization and the resultant general feeling of the isolation of the individual; 3. a radical absence of significant social change in the internal development of the nation. (In this connection I find it symptomatic that in France, a country where nothing really happens, the percentage of writers is twenty-one times higher than in Israel. Bibi [character from the book] was absolutely right when she claimed never to have experienced anything from the outside. It is this absence of content, this void, that powers the moter driving her to write). But the effect transmits a kind of flashback to the cause. If general isolation causes graphomania, mass graphomania itself reinforces and aggravates the feeling of general isolation. The invention of printing originally promoted mutual understanding. In the era of graphomania the writing of books has the opposite effect: everyone surrounds himself with his own writings as with a wall of mirrors cutting off all voices from without."

"Having a child is to show an absolute accord with mankind. If I have a child, it's as though I'm saying: I was born and have tasted life and declare it so good that is merits being duplicated."

"Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary."

"He could not quite understand what had happened. He began to sense an aura of hitherto unknown happiness emanating from them."

"He considered music a liberating force: it liberated him from loneliness, introversion, the dust of the library; it opened the door of his body and allowed his soul to step out into the world and make friends."

"He felt as if she no longer existed for him, had gone off somewhere, into some other life where, if he should meet her, he would no longer recognize her."

"He had gone back to Prague because of her. So fateful a decision resting on so fortuitous a love, a love that would not even have existed had it not been for the chief surgeon's sciatica seven years earlier. And that woman, that personification of absolute fortuity, now again lay beside him, breathing deeply."

"He had entered Parmenides' magic field: he was enjoying the sweet lightness of being."

"He had spent seven years of his life with Tereza, and now he realized that those years were more attractive in retrospect than they were when he was living them."

"He knew very well that his memory, and do nothing other than slander him, and thus effortlessly agent gives it credibility and become more tolerant of his life. But without result, you do not feel any pleasure given back and was doing it as little as possible."

"He kept recalling her lying on his bed; she reminded him of no one in his former life."

"He had never wanted to know anything about the part of her intimate life that he had not shared with her. Why should he take an interest now, still less take offense at it? Anyhow, he asked himself, what is an intimate secret? Is that where we hide what's most mysterious, most singular, most original about a human being? Are her intimate secrets what make Chantal the unique being he loves? No. What people keep secret is the most common, the most ordinary, the most prevalent thing, the same thing that everybody has: the body and its needs, its maladies, its manias-constipation for instance, or menstruation. We ashamedly conceal these intimate matters not because they are so personal but on the contrary, they are so lamentably impersonal."

"He looked at her and tried to discover behind her lascivious expression the familiar features that he loved tenderly. It was as if he were looking at two images through the same lens, at two images superimposed one on the other with one showing through the other. These two images showing through each other were telling him that everything was in the girl, that her soul was terrifyingly amorphous, that it held faithfulness and unfaithfulness, treachery and innocence, flirtatiousness and chastity. This disorderly jumble seemed disgusting to him, like the variety to be found in a pile of garbage. Both images continued to show through each other, and the young man understood that the girl differed only on the surface from other women, but deep down was the same as they: full of all possible thoughts, feelings, and vices, which justified all his secret misgivings and fits of jealousy. The impression that certain outlines delineated her as an individual was only a delusion to which the other person, the one who was looking, was subject--namely himself. It seemed to him that the girl he loved was a creation of his desire, his thoughts, and his faith and that the real girl now standing in front of him was hopelessly other, hopelessly alien, hopelessly ambiguous. He hated her."

"He looks at Mama out of the corner of his eye, again surprised by how little she is. As if all of her life has been a slow process of shrinkage."

"He realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love."

"He remained annoyed with himself until he realized that not knowing what he wanted was actually quite natural. We can never know what to want because, living only one life, we can never compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come."

"He read the poem many times in a row with a melodious voice and pathetic was delighted. At the bottom of this poem were Magda in the tub and he himself with eye, back at the door to say he had not gotten beyond their experience, and that experience high above; aversion to himself to stay down, down there his hands were sweating with worry and his breathing accelerated, up here, in the poem, stood high over his prick. What happened to the keyhole and his own cowardice have become a springboard from which now ejection was no longer subject to the experience and the experience was dependent on his writings. Nothing disgusts me more than the feeling of brotherhood between people, sparked by the discovery of common infamy. Do not yearn for such extreme viscous fraternity."

"He realized that the path of love, which Bertlef had suggested, was closed to him; it was the path of saints, not of ordinary men."