Dorra Wider

“Nous aimons des êtres, nous nous attachons à des choses, et tout ce petit monde grandit en nos coeurs et en nos esprits jusqu'à ce qu'il soit transfiguré par l'éclat de l'immortalité. Mais quand nous faisons l'expérience de leur fragilité, quand nous prenons conscience qu'elles ne sont pasd'airain mais en porcelaine, nos coeurs et nos esprits s'en retrouvent fêlés, pour toujours. Nous succombons alors à la folle tentation de descendre dans les caves profondes, en quête des morceaux brisés, obsédés par le désir aveugle de les recoller et de les tenir à nouveau entre nos mains. Nous nous risquons d'y demeurer à tout jamais, fragments de porcelaine disparates à notre tour, tels les débris d'une civilisation morte au fond de l'océan..”
― Mohamed Harmel, les rêves perdus de Leyla

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

“I am beginning to be sorry that I ever undertook to write this book. Not that it bores me; I have nothing else to do; indeed, it is a welcome distraction from eternity. But the book is tedious, it smells of the tomb, it has a rigor mortis about it; a serious fault, and yet a relatively small one, for the great defect of this book is you, reader. You want to live fast, to get to the end, and the book ambles along slowly; you like straight, solid narrative and a smooth style, but this book and my style are like a pair of drunks; they stagger to the right and to the left, they start and they stop, they mutter, they roar, they guffaw, they threaten the sky, they slip and fall...
And fall! Unhappy leaves of my cypress tree, you had to fall, like everything else that is lovely and beautiful; if I had eyes, I would shed a tear of remembrance for you. And this is the great advantage in being dead, that if you have no mouth with which to laugh, neither have you eyes with which to cry.”
― Machado de Assis, Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas

“Perhaps the reader is astonished by the frankness with which I expose and emphasize my mediocrity; let him remember that frankness is the virtue most appropriate to a defunct. In life, the watchful eye of public opinion, the conflict of interests, the struggle of greed against greed oblige a man to hide his old rags, to conceal the rips and patches, to withhold from the world the revelations that he makes to his own conscience; and the greatest reward comes when a man, in so deceiving others, manages at the same time to deceive himself, for in such case he spares himself shame, which is a painful experience, and hypocrisy, which is a hideous vice. But in death, what a difference! what relief! what freedom! How glorious to throw away your cloak, to dump your spangles in a ditch, to unfold yourself, to strip off all your paint and ornaments, to confess plainly what you were and what you failed to be! For, after all, you have no neighbors, no friends, no enemies, no acquaintances, no strangers, no audience at all. The sharp and judicial eye of public opinion loses its power as soon as we enter the territory of death. I do not deny that it sometimes glances this way and examines and judges us, but we dead folk are not concerned about its judgment. You who still live, believe me, there is nothing in the world so monstrously vast as our indifference.”
― Machado de Assis, Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas