“The point is: his life was not centered around the place where he lived. His house was just one of many stopping places in a restless, unmoored existence, and this lack of center had the effect of turning him into a perpetual outsider, a tourist of his own life. You never had the feeling that he could be located.”
― The Invention of Solitude
― The Invention of Solitude
“The public and private worlds are inseparably connected ... the tyrannies and servilities of one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.”
― Three Guineas
― Three Guineas
“And if Amsterdam was hell, and if hell was a memory, then he realized that perhaps there was some purpose to his being lost. Cut off from everything that was familiar to him, unable to discover even a single point of reference, he saw that his steps, by taking him nowhere, were taking him him nowhere but into himself. He was wandering inside himself, and he was lost. Far from troubling him, this state of being lost because a source of happiness, of exhilaration. He breathed it into his very bones. As if on the brink of some previously hidden knowledge, he breathed it into his very bones and said to himself, almost triumphantly: I am lost.”
― The Invention of Solitude
― The Invention of Solitude
“Unrequited love is the infinite curse of a lonely heart.”
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Pensée’s 2025 Year in Books
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