Status Updates From Om olägenheten i att vara född

“for the victim it anxiety, there is no difference between success and fiasco. his reaction to one is the same as to the other: both trouble him equally.”

“to live in expectation, to count on the future or on a simulacrum of the future: we are so accustomed to it that we have conceived the idea of immortality only out of a need to wait out eternity.”

“gogol, in hopes of a ‘regeneration,’ journeys to nazareth and discovers he is as bored there as ‘in a russian railroad station’ — this is what happens to us all when we look outside ourselves for what can exist only inside.”

“a man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of his talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity.”

twin!

“the same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever i go: i pretend interest in what matters is nothing to me, i bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. what attracts me is elsewhere, and i don’t know what that elsewhere is.”

goodness

"However disabused one may be, it is impossible to live without any hope at all. We always keep one, unwittingly, and this unconscious hope makes up for all the explicit others we have rejected, exhausted."
"A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of his talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity."