Emerson

A man is reputed to have thought and eloquence; he cannot, for all that, say a word to his cousin or his uncle.  They accuse his silence with as much reason as they would blame the insignificance of a dial in the shade.  In the sun it will mark the hour.  Among those who enjoy his thought he will regain his tongue.

Marguerite Yourcenar

chaque homme a éternellement à choisir, au cours de sa vie brève, entre l’espoir infatigable et la sage absence d’espérance, entre les délices du chaos et celles de la stabilité, entre le Titan et L’Olympien. A choisir entre eux, ou à réussir à les accorder un jour l’un à l’autre.

Marguerite Yourcenar

Notre grande erreur est d’essayer d’obtenir de chacun en particulier les vertus qu’il n’a pas, et de négliger de cultiver celles qu’il possède.

Marguerite Yourcenar

La lettre écrite m’a enseigné à écouter la voix humaine, tout comme les grandes attitudes immobiles des statues m’ont appris à apprécier les gestes. Par contre, et dans la suite, la vie m’a éclairci les livres.

Proust

Il admirait la terrible puissance recréatrice de sa mémoire. Ce n’est que de l’affaiblissement de cette génératrice dont la fécondité diminue avec l’âge qu’il pouvait espérer un apaisement à sa torture.

Annie Leclerc

L’homme ne se concevrait-il comme sexué, sexuel, donc homme véritable, que lorsqu’il est en érection ?


Tout se passe comme si l’homme manquait d’une représentation de lui-même qui intègre de façon permanente et continue sa sexualité…


Il semble qu’il ait tout fait pour effacer, ensevelir l’image flottante et indécise de lui-même qui l’empêche de se reconnaître comme sexué, comme particulièrement homme, tant que son sexe n’est pas en activité, et n’ait pu réussir à l’oublier définitivement qu’en la recouvrant de l’exigence d’un devoir-être, où les fins à atteindre miment à un autre niveau ce qu’il perçoit de lui au moment de l’érection.


Bref, comme si l’homme, ne se sentant que brièvement sexuel, et par là incertainement sexué, s’imposait par des moyens détournés de l’être à temps complet. D’où la volonté de pratiquer un certain nombre de vertus qui paradoxalement seraient le propre de l’homme, et permettraient en retour de le définir

Proust

Comme tous ceux qui possèdent une chose, pour savoir ce qui arriverait s’il cessait un moment de la posséder, il avait ôté cette chose de son esprit, en y laissant tout le reste dans le même état que quand elle était là. Or l’absence d’une chose, ce n’est pas que cela, ce n’est pas un simple manque partiel, c’est un bouleversement de tout le reste, c’est un état nouveau qu’on ne peut prévoir dans l’ancien.

James Joyce

He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself:


--A day of dappled seaborne clouds.


The phrase and the day and the scene harmonised in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue; sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the grey fringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours; it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colours? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language many coloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?

James Joyce

He wanted to meet in the real world the insubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld. He did not know where to seek it or how: but a premonition which led him on told him that this image would, without any overt act of his, encounter him. They would meet quietly as if they had known each other and had made their tryst, perhaps at one of the gates or in some more secret place. They would be alone, surrounded by darkness and silence: and in that moment of supreme tenderness he would be transfigured. He would fade into something impalpable under her eyes and then in a moment, he would be transfigured. Weakness and timidity and inexperience would fall from him in that magic moment.

André Gide

ne cherche pas, dans l'avenir, à retrouver jamais le passé. Saisis de chaque instant la nouveauté irremplaçable et ne prépare pas tes joies, ou sache qu'en son lieu préparé te surprendra une joie autre.

Que n'as tu pas compris que tout bonheur est de rencontrer et se présenter à toi dans chaque instant comme un mendiant sur ta route. Malheur à toi si tu dis que ton bonheur est mort parce que tu n'avais pas rêvé pareil à cela ton bonheur - et que tu ne l'admets que conforme à tes principes et à tes voux.

André Gide

c’est par peur d’une perte d’amour que parfois j’ai pu sympathiser avec des tristesses, des ennuis, des douleurs que sinon, je n’aurais qu’à peine endurés. Laisse à chacun le soin de sa vie.

Everything But the Girl

Something has come between me and the world that knew 
what I thought would last is falling apart in the face of something new 
how can I explain that I had no choice
the sound of the waves fills her ears and drowns out my voice 
and I'm just too far away for her to believe what I say 
she couldn't hear me, she wouldn't listen anyway

How can I write a letter the post is so slow
if I'm to disappoint her then that's something she ought to know 
I can just hear her voice fall as I wait here alone
how can so much harm be done by just two minutes spent on the phone 
you say that things will get better
but she would hate me if I let her
and she reads so much in every word that I say

I thought that being apart would just bring us some variety
but after some time it seems clear that she's changed in a different way from 
me 
and I would like to shout at someone but no one's to blame
it's just her it's just me and everything that is 
just not the same
sometimes I would turn back the clock 
and recapture all that we've lost 
but I couldn't give up all that we have today

Iris Murdock

to know clearly what you surrender, what you gain, and to have no regrets, to revisit without envy the scenes of a surrendered joy, and to taste it ephemerally once more, with a delight undimmed by the knowledge that it is momentary, that is happiness, that surely is freedom.

William H. Gass

Children collect nouns, bugs, bottle caps, seashells, verbs: what’s that?  What’s it doing now?  Who’s this? And with the greed which rushes through them like rain down gulleys, they immediately grasp the prepositions of belonging and the pronouns of possessions.  But how often do they ask how cold it is, what color, how loud, rare, warm, responsive, kin, how soft, how wet, how noxious, loving, indisreet, how sour?

Milan Kundera

Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.

E. M. Forster

Man is an odd, sad creature as yet, intent on pilfering the earth, and heedless of the growths within himself.  He cannot be bored about psychology.  He leaves it to the specialist, which is as if he should leave his dinner to be eaten by a steam engine.  He cannot be bothered to digest his own soul.

Cicero

Haec est nunc vita mea: saluto bonos veros qui ad me veniunt; deinde aut scriba aut lego; post haec omne tempus corpori datur

Cicero

Numquam enim temeritas cum sapientia commiscetur.

Publilius Syrus

Amor misceri cum timore non potest.

Horace

Qui coepit, dimidium facti habet. Incipe!

Jean Philippe Toussaint

Assis sur le rebord de la baignoire, j’expliquais à Edmondsson qu’il n’était peut-être pas très sain, à vingt-sept ans, bientôt vingt-neuf, de vivre plus ou moins reclus dans une baignoire. Je devais prendre un risque, disais-je les yeux baisse, en caressant l’émail de la baignoire, le risque de compromettre la quiétude de ma vie abstraite pour. Je ne terminais pas la phrase.

Saul Bellow

There was no stain in the water, where schools of minnows swam.  Herzog sighed and said to himself “Praise God... praise God.”  His breathing had become freer.  His heart was greatly stirred by the open horizon; the deep colours; the faint iodine pungency of the Atlantic rising from weeds and mollusks; the white, fine, heavy sand; but principally by the green transparency as he looked down to the stony bottom webbed with golden lines.  Never still.  If his soul could cast a reflection so brilliant, and so intensely sweet, he might beg God to make such use of him.  But that would be too simple.  But that would be too childish.  The actual sphere is not clear like this, but turbulent, angry.  A vast human action is going on.  Death watches.  So if you have some happiness, conceal it.  And when your heart is full, keep your mouth shut also.

Lech Walesa

Figurez-vous trois boulangeries.  L’une privée, l’autre d’Etat et la troisième relevant au kolkhoze.  Celle qui cuit le meilleur pain est socialiste!

Iris Murdock

...shall I simply sit by the fire and read Shakespeare, coming home to the place where magic does not shrink reality and turn it into tiny things to be the toys of fairies? There may be no saints but there is at least one proof that the light of self-satisfaction can illuminate the world... Can one change oneself? I doubt it. Or if there is any change it must be measured at the millionth part of a millimetre. When the poor ghosts are gone, what remains are ordinary obligations and ordinary interests. One can live quietly and try to do tiny little things and harm no one. I cannot think of any tiny good thing to do at the moment, but perhaps I will think of one tomorrow.

Heinrich Böll

Politeness is really the most effective form of contempt.

Iris Murdock

There’s nothing like a woman’s doing you an injury for making her incensed against you.

Colin Wilson

The problem for the civilization is the adoption of a religious attitude that can be assimilated as objectively as last Sunday’s newspapers. But the problem for the individual will always be the opposite of this, the conscious striving not to limit the amount of experience seen and touched; the intolerable struggle to expose the sensitive areas of being to what may possibly hurt them; the attempt to see as a whole, although the instinct of self-preservation fights against the pain of the internal widening and all the impulses of spiritual laziness build into waves of sleep with every new effort. The individual begins that long effort as an Outsider.

Cynthia Ozick

what was missing in the glory that was Greece was metaphor… You will say, What? A nation of myth and you claim it has no metaphor? Aren’t myths the greatest metaphors of all?… how humanly resplendent: each god represents an aspect of human passion. Here is beauty, here is lust, here is wisdom, here is chance, here is courage, here is mendacity, here is war, and so on and so on. Isn’t that metaphoric enough for you?

“Observe: there is no god or goddess who stands for the still small voice of conscience.”

Lev. 24:22 “You shall have one manner of law, the same for the stranger as for the home-born.” …this precept of loving the stranger appears 36 times in the Pentateuch. It is there because a moral connection has been made with the memory of bondage… Without the metaphor of memory and history, we cannot imagine the life of the Other…

In the absence of this metaphoric capability, what are the consequences? Nowhere beyond the reach of the Pentateuch did the alien and the home-born live under the same code. The Romans originally had a single word, hostis, to signify both enemy and stranger, in early Roman law, every alien was classed as an enemy, devoid of rights. In Germanic law the alien was rechtsunfahig, a pariah with no access to justice. The Greeks made slaves of the stranger and then taunted him with barks. There have been and still are, religio-political systems that have incorporated the teaching of contempt, turning the closest neighbors into the most despised strangers – a loathing expressed in words like, “untouchable”, dhimmi,” “diecide”. In our own country, slavery thrived under the wing of a freedom-proclaiming Constitution… And in 1945, a British camera on a single day in a single German deathcamp just liberated photographed a bulldozer sweeping into five pits 5,000 starved and abused human corpses at a time, a thousand to a pit, all of them having been judged unfit for the right to live.

Henry James

She had never met a person having less of that fault which is the principle obstacle to friendship - the air of reproducing the more tiresome, the stale, the too-familiar parts of one’s own character.

Henry James

A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see - that’s my idea of happiness.