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Reality can't stay inside the elegant moulds of art; it always spills over, indecorously.

The future that interests me is a future of absolute openness to the other, to any living being, to everything endowed with the breath of life.

Beliefs aren't good or bad; they serve only to bring order, at least momentarily, to our anguish.

In the same way that a person can be transformed by the imaginary events recounted in a work of fiction, Baumgartner has been transformed by the story he told himself in the dream.

To write is to spend oneself, to gamble oneself.

The writer is in love with himself...and makes his books out of that meeting and that violence.

11/19/59

...we talk to ourselves more than we'll talk to any other person over the course of our lives...

I water my white mind with books.

1/4/58

"The nature of life is change and the nature of people is to resist change."

Emerson said: "A man is what he thinks about all day."
Emerson the existentialist.

1/20/57

I learnt that life was to be enjoyed rather than merely endured.

...the novel is the fruit of a human illusion. The illusion of the power to understand others. But what do we know of one another?

The past is not just that which happened to you. Sometimes it is that which you just imagined.

we live at the mercy of certain silences.

Most of the time, I achieved peace of mind by taking care never to exclude altogether either the freedom which exalts or the necessity which justifies.

And we did not age. The things around us didn't last long enough to grow old, replaced and rehabilitated at lightning speed. Our memory didn't have time to associate them with moments of existence.

Of all the ways in which self-knowledge may be fostered, perhaps one of the greatest is a person's ability to discern how they view the past, at every time of life and every age...

The distance that separates past from present can be measured, perhaps, by the light that spills across the ground between shadows, slips over faces, outlines the folds of a dress - by the twilight clarity of a black-and-white photo, no matter what time it is taken.

-to exist is to drink oneself without thirst

love is: a declaration of eternity to be fulfilled or unfurled as best it can within time: eternity descending into time.

...if what we experience as 'reality' is structured by fantasy, and if fantasy serves as the screen that protects us from being directly overwhelmed by the raw Real, then reality itself can function as an escape from encountering the Real.

The moment of happiness he shared with them remained in his mind, but he never knew what to make of it. Do such moments really mean, as they seem to, that we have a life of happiness with which we only occasionally, knowingly, intersect? Do they shed such light before and after that all that has happened to us in our lives - or that we've made happen - can be dismissed?

Could you refuse me if I asked you
to point again at the horizon, to tell me
something was worth waiting for?

Moments of kindness and reconciliation are worth having, even if the parting has to come sooner or later. I wonder if those moments aren't more valued, and deliberately gone after, in the setups some people like myself have now, than they were in those old marriages, where love and grudges could be growing underground, so confused and stubborn, it must have seemed they had forever.

He who, from zone to zone,
Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,
In the long way that I must tread alone,
Will lead my steps aright.

'Should we go?' Suddenly, she didn't want to linger. The others we'd been were receding. We found we were alone with ourselves.

Couples went in the opposite direction; trailed off. No one belonged; there was a tentativeness in their movements, like they were trespassing. Or as if they were being given access without reason.

No human can be unhappy without interruption.

Happiness: "the release from the awareness of who or where you are, which comes to us a few times a day."

He had never known such a mix of intense and contrary feelings, one of which was sadness, for he suspected that they would never meet again. Another was anger...He paused a moment to check if there was anything more he could give or if she had more to tell him. But they were mute, there was nothing, so he set off into the rain.