Maja

“A person is nothing but his image. Philosophers can tell us that it doesn't matter what the world thinks of us, that nothing matters but what we really are. But philosophers don't understand anything. As long as we live with other people, we are only what other people consider us to be. Thinking about how others see us and trying to make our image as attractive as possible is considered a kind of dissembling or cheating. But does there exist another kind of direct contact between my self and their selves except through the mediation of the eyes? Can we possibly imagine love without anxiously following our image in the mind of the beloved? When we are no longer interested in how we are seen by the person we love, it means we no longer love.”
― Milan Kundera, Immortality

“Perché ha sempre voglia di troppe cose e sempre di quelle che non può avere, di quelle passate o, peggio ancora, di quelle che non arriveranno mai? È una condanna, la sua? A vent'anni comincia a desiderare che tutte quelle voglie spariscano senza lasciare traccia. Deve pur giungere il momento in cui un uomo smette di essere diviso a metà, in cui un uomo si trova esattamente dove vuole stare.”
― Paolo Giordano, Il corpo umano

“Something’s died in me,” she goes. “It took a long time for it to do it, but it’s dead. You’ve killed something, just like you’d took an axe to it. Everything is dirt now.”
― Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

“Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one’s painful self through the world.
But being, being is happiness. Being: Becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain.”
― Milan Kundera, Immortality