“As someone said to me--I can't remember now who it was--it is really remarkable that when you wake up in the morning you nearly always find everything in exactly the same place as the evening before. For when asleep and dreaming you are, apparently at least, in an essentially different state from that of wakefulness; and therefore, as that man truly said, it requires enormous presence of mind or rather quickness of wit, when opening your eyes to seize hold as it were of everything in the room at exactly the same place where you had let it go on the previous evening. That was why, he said, the moment of waking up was the riskiest moment of the day. Once that was well over without deflecting you from your orbit, you could take heart of grace for the rest of the day.”
― The Trial
― The Trial
“... whoever has at some time built a "new heaven" has found the power to do so only in his own hell.”
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“This self-overcoming of justice: one knows the beautiful name it has given itself - mercy; it goes without saying that mercy remains the privilege of the most powerful man, or better, his - beyond the law.”
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“Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.”
― Of the Standard of Taste and Other Essays
― Of the Standard of Taste and Other Essays
Aprile’s 2025 Year in Books
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