

“What folly made young people, even those in middle age, think they were immortal? How much better, their lives, if they could remember the end. Carrying your death with you every day would make it hard to waste time on unkindness and anger and bitterness, on anything petty. That was the secret: remembering your dying time, in order to keep the stupid and the ugly out of your living time.”
― Family Matters
― Family Matters

“Curious, he thought, how, if you knew a person long enough, he could elicit every kind of emotion from you, every possible reaction, envy, admiration, pity, irritation, fury, fondness, jealousy, love, disgust. But in the end all human beings became candidates for compassion, all of us, without exception...and if we could recognize this from the beginning, what a saving in pain and grief and misery.”
― Family Matters
― Family Matters

“… I came to realize that I was always looking for myself in the women I loved. I looked at their lovely, clean faces and saw myself reflected in them. They, on the other hand, looked at me and saw the dirt on my face and, however intelligent or self-confident they were, they ended up seeing themselves reflected in me and thinking that they were worse than they were. […] If I were to see her again, my face needed to be as clean as hers. Before I could find her, I must first find myself.”
― The Zahir
― The Zahir

“You don’t expect flowers to grow in nice clean vacuums.” That was his argument. “They need mould and clay and dung. So does art.”
― Point Counter Point
― Point Counter Point
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