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.
Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero?
To put it another way, every love relationship is based upon unwritten conventions rashly agreed upon by the lovers during the first weeks of their love. On the one hand, they are living a sort of dream; on the other, without realizing it, they are drawing up the fine print of their contracts like the most hard-nosed of lawyers. O lovers! Be wary during those perilous first days! If you serve the other party breakfast in bed, you will be obliged to continue same in perpetuity or face charges of animosity and treason!
If hatred strikes you, if you get accused, thrown to the lions, you can expect one of two reactions from people who know you: some of them will join in the kill, the others will discreetly pretend to know nothing, hear nothing, so you can go right on seeing them and talking to them. That second category, discreet and tactful, those are your friends. 'Friends' in the modern sense of the term. Listen, Jean-Marc, I've known that forever.
The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history.
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.
Sensuality is the total mobilization of the senses: an individual observes his partner intently, straining to catch every sound.
God has been kind to dogs in no putting a sense of beauty into their heads.
nothing yet. I've been waiting." "for what?" she made no response. she could not tell him that she had been waiting for him.
Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events; but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth.
Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia. Every year it gets harder to change.
Living is being happy: seeing, hearing, touching, drinking, eating, urinating, defecating, diving into the water and gazing at the sky, laughing and crying.
Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.
A man who loses his privacy loses everything. And a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster.
I have to lie, if I don't want to take madmen seriously and become a madman myself
...people don't respect the morning. An alarm clock violently wakes them up, shatters their sleep like the blow of an ax, and they immediately surrender themselves to deadly haste.
Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.
Mankind's real moral test, a test so radical and so deep that it escapes our gaze, is probably the one of its relations with those that are the most at its mercy; the Animals.
The ludicrous element in our feeling does not make them any less authentic.
For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?
The difference between the university graduate and the autodidact lies not so much in the extent of knowledge as in the extent of vitality and self-confidence.
Love is a battle, and I plan to go on fighting. To the end.
Immortality no longer interests the weary old man at all.
The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters.
The river flowed from century to century, and human affairs play themselves out on its banks. Play themselves out to be forgotten the next day, while the river flows on.
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