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All ages feel that their conflicts are equally serious, a matter of life and death. They consider that their circumstances justify extreme measures. Every age believes itself to be exposed to great dangers , and every age is prepared o break its own established rules and regulations , to feel constrained by its own restrictions and to find ways of ignoring them or getting round them .

That night I genuinely didn’t know what to do, but I did, of course, stay with Tomas. You would need to have lost an awful lot before you’d be willing to renounce what you have. You curb your impetuous urges , your expectations , you accept the somewhat tarnished version of what you were hoping to achieve or thought you had achieved , and besides, there are disappointments and imperfections at all stages of life .

As all we know, imagination is often far wilder than reality, even if it lacks the latter's precision and terrible force, so you can always dismiss what it tells you and say to yourself: 'That might well not have happened, and since I have no idea what really happened, nor ever will, why torment myself with conjectures?’

Peace,alas,is only ever apparent and transitory,a pretense.War is the natural state of the world.Often it’s open warfare,but when it’s not,war is always there in latent or indirect form or is merely a war-in-waiting.There are large portions of humanity who are always trying to harm others,or to take something from them,and rancour and discord reign at all times, if not, then they’re in the wings, watching and waiting

Those were the days of the so-called sexual liberation,which was permeated by the idea that there was barely any difference between having sex with someone and having a cup of coffee with them,as they were equivalent activities, &as if neither should leave behind any trace or sense of unease.(Even if no memory remains,the event does at least leave a trace, perhaps only in our knowledge &awareness that it did occur)

When she believed that her husband was her husband, she felt less at ease and found it harder to get out of bed and begin the day, she felt a prisoner of what she had so long been waiting for and which had now happened and for which she no longer waited, because anyone who has grown used to waiting never entirely consents to that waiting coming to a close, it’s like having half the air you breathe snatched from you.

I learned a great deal about the decline in Britain's authority at the world body. I observed more than a few minutely raised eyebrows, if the British Foreign Secretary's name came up. His propensity to use racist epithets was widely known. In this multilateral forum, in an age in which media articles have a global reach, Mr Johnson and his writings offered useful support for Mauritius.

A classic is something that tends to relegate the concerns of the moment to the status of background noise, but at the same time this background noise is something we cannot do without.

A classic is something that persists as a background noise even when the most incompatible momentary concerns are in control of the situation.

Has it occurred to you that socialist art aspires to be something like magic?You draw a bison on a rock face&that evening you get something hot to eat.Bureaucrats of official art reason the same way.If you portray something that’s positive,then everyone will be all right.But if it’s something negative,the opposite result will occur.If you depict a Stakhanovite feat of labour,it follows that everyone will work hard.

You write very well about the costs of freedom,freedom as a constant goal but also as a heavy burden.Consider what is  going on here in the émigré community.Driver's licenses can be bought for 100 dollars,a graduate degree for 250.It is painful to think that all this vileness is born of freedom,for freedom is equally gracious to the bad and the good.Under its rays,both gladiolas and marijuana flower with equal speed.

I came to the conclusion that it is stupid to divide people into good and evil. And also into Communists and non-Party members, into villains and righteous, and even into men and women. Since the time of Aristotle the human brain has not changed. What is more, human consciousness has not changed.And this means there is no progress. There is only movement, unsteady at its foundation.

Everything went downhill & as a culmination of all this–guard duty in a prison camp.What I saw there shocked me completely.For the first time,I understood what freedom is, &cruelty &violence.I saw freedom behind bars,cruelty as senseless as poetry,violence as common as dampness.But life continued.What is more,life’s usual proportions stayed the he same. The ratio of good and evil,grief &happiness,remained unchanged.

Ma belle amie, l'homme le plus adroit ne peut encore se tenir au niveau de la femme la plus vraie.

Life itself is an unfinished sentence, or a few haphazard brush-strokes. Nothing stays. Nothing is completed. The meaning of a painting is a voice crying out:"I saw it. Before it vanished, it was thus." An honest painting would never be finished; an honest novel would stop in the middle of a sentence.There is no shutting life up in a cage, turning the key with a full-stop, with a stroke of paint.

Ugliness has the extra power of making beauty seem unreal, a service beauty seems rarely able to return.

Upon this impermanence we set up our easels and paint our pictures. What goes on to the canvas is the ticking of our hearts, the pulse of our lives. Yet when we die, what will happen? Those manifestos of ours against the indifference of the world will lie, face down, among old books and ornaments in junk-shops, in attics.

It's just that people are like doors. They all lead you into empty rooms. You pass through and are left with yourself.

Duty is very simple and obvious. It is nearly always what you don't want to do.

When Camilla opened the door, birds burst up out of bushes, flurrying the leaves, plunged into the dense creeper over the walls.The garden was still, soaked with dew, veiled with a pearly light as if sponged with milk. A little tree of morello cherries seemed painted upon the sky, its fruit luminously red like cherries on a hat.

The one she painted last summer was the best she ever did. The one of the room with the lace curtains. A very tender light flowing through them.'

'Yes, that was what I call a picture. Perhaps we always want paintings to be like novels.'

Where does this barbed wire end?
Snails crawl across the clothes of the killed.
Yet we did not come into the world
only to die.
Since at dawn
it smells of lemon peel.

Under the lukewarm water of night I held
the hand of sleep and the sense of forgetting
the texture of the blanket and of the wall.
If you lift the sheet
you won’t find me.
Try to find me – don’t you understand?
I’m deeper in.

I think the great novelists understand love, and most aspects of human behaviour, better than, say, psychiatrists or scientists or philosophers or priests or lonely-hearts columnists.

The brain only informs us on a need-to-know basis. Think of the world of John le Carré. Think of ourself - our self - as an agent running in the field, being told only part of a much wider picture, just enough for us to behave plausibly and fulfil our functions. 'Control' is running us, but at the same time we 'are' our brains. Even le Carré can't compete with all the complications and subterfuges of this.

Nothing is worth the destruction of another human being. Somewhere the path of pain and betrayal must end.

Legmen for Haydon's Soviet networks, they'd been around for years, known simply as the Russians. They were blond and squat and they looked more like Russians than the real ones.

Guillam noticed the queer colour of Haydon’s cheeks. A blushing red, daubed high on the bones, but deep, made up of tiny broken veins. It gave him, thought Guillam in his heightened state of nervousness, a slightly Dorian Gray look.

Flaubert believed it was impossible to explain one art form in terms of another & great paintings required no words of explanation.Braque thought the ideal state would be reached when we said nothing at all in front of a painting.But we are very far from reaching that state.We remain incorrigibly verbal creatures who love to explain things, to form opinions.It is a rare picture which stuns,or argues, us into silence.

Out of date perhaps, but who wasn’t these days? Out of date, but loyal to his own time. At a certain moment, after all, every man chooses: will he go forward, will he go back? There was nothing dishonourable in not being blown about by every little modern wind.

The song composer Schubert excited the Viennese public with his ‘new sounds’, especially harmonies, with often unconventional,difficult accompaniments. The elite Schuppanzigh Quartet introduced Beethoven but also Schubert into its programs. Still,the public knew virtually nothing about Schubert’s chamber music–as little as of the symphonies, none of which was publicly performed or published in Schubert’s lifetime.