Pushan

“When we study, discuss, analyze a reality, we analyze it as it appears in our mind, in our memory. We know reality only in the past tense. We do not know it as it is in the present, in the moment when it's happening, when it is. The present moment is unlike the memory of it. Remembering is not the negative of forgetting. Remembering is a form of forgetting.

[...] We die without knowing what we have lived.”
― Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

“The past is always beautiful. So, for that matter, is the future. Only the present hurts, and we carry it around like an abscess of suffering, our compassion between two infinities of happiness and peace.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Soumission

“I recognized no obstacle to miraculous change but the incredulity of others. This was an idea that died hard, if it ever really died at all.”
― Tobias Wolff, This Boy's Life

“Biographers know nothing about the intimate sex lives of their own wives, but they think they know all about Stendhal’s or Faulkner’s.”
― Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts