Tal Taran > Recent Status Updates

Book Two

“Until now she had always believed that it was failure only that was intolerable, but now she understood that victory too was intolerable, because the most shameful element of the desperate struggle was not that she remained on top, but that there was no chance of defeat.”

“Life is a succession of misunderstandings.”

“Where Hegel goes wrong, on the other hand, is in talking about faith, in not protesting loudly and clearly against the honour and glory enjoyed by Abraham as the father of faith when he should really be remitted to some lower court for trial and exposed as a murderer.”

"Faith begins precisely where thinking leaves off."

“The peasants said the smoke from the crematories went straight to heaven, laying a soft carpet at God’s feet without even soiling them. I wondered whether so many Jews were necessary to compensate God for the killing of his son.”

“I almost believed that I wasn’t going to be allowed to escape; whatever I did would lead to another barrier, and then another, until I stopped and gave in.”

“I felt as if I had been fighting someone too strong for me for far too long.”

“Reality had become a nightmare, and sleep beckoned insistently; a black hole calling me, pain-free, lost in time, like death.”

“Words wasted into the snow and wind, shouted to no one in particular in a shaking fury of bitterness and grievance. Idiot words, as meaningless as the hissing empty wind around me.”

“…I could ignore much of the pain. It became one more difficultly to contend with and merged with all the other problems…”

"If you succeed with one dream, you come back to square one and it's not long before you're conjuring u another, slightly harder, a bit more ambitious—a bit more dangerous. I didn't like the thought of where it might be leading me, As if, in some strange way, the very nature of the game was controlling me, taking me towards a logical but frightening conclusion; it always unsettled me, this moment..."

"He was a dreamer, eternally absorbed in his fantasies. Because of his limitless good nature and colossal size, which kept him from noticing anything smaller than himself, he failed to give sufficient attention to what was going on, misunderstood all that was said, and, mistaking the views of his opponents for his own, agreed with everything."

“There’s no narcotic like exhaustion.”

"In the memories of those who lived through them, the grim days of the plague do not stand out like livid flames, ravenous and inextinguishable, beaconing a troubled sky, but rather like the slow, deliberate progress of some monstrous thing crushing out all upon its path."

"Their despair saved them from panic, thus their misfortune had a good side. For instance, if it happened that one of them was carried off by the disease, it was almost always without his having had time to realise it. Snatched suddenly from his long, silent communion with a wraith of memory, he was plunged straightway into the densest silence of all. He'd had no time for anything."

“The defenders of traditional morality are seldom people with warm hearts.”

From ‘What I Believe’

"The men and women consume each other rapidly in what is called 'the act of love', or else settle down to a mild habit of conjugality. We seldom find a mean between these extremes. That, too, is not exceptional. At Oran, as elsewhere, for lack of time and thinking, people have to love each other without knowing much about it."

“Occasionally I watch trash TV because I think the poet shouldn’t avert his eyes.”

“What should I say about my life? That it’s long.”

“If you harshly light every last corner of a house, the house will be uninhabitable. It’s like that with your soul, if you light it up, shadows and darkness and all, people will become uninhabitable. I’m convinced that it’s psychoanalysis, along with quite a few other mistakes, that has made the 20th century so terrible. As far as I’m concerned the 20th century in its entirety was a mistake.”

There are so few excuses for a book being this long. I assume Tolstoy was paid per page... What I've learnt so far is:

Life is meaningless and never ends...

"the highest of mountains is capable of severity, a severity so awful and so fatal that the wiser sort of men do well to think and tremble even on the threshold of their high endeavour."
- Mallory

"He would have walked on, even to his end, because for him as for all of his generation death was but 'a frail barrier' that men crossed, 'smiling and gallant, every day'. They had seen so much of death that life mattered less than the moments of being alive."

"There was in fact a growing divide between those who still considered climbing to be a sport of gentlemen, and a new generation who played in an altogether different league. The former used the language of war to describe their efforts and intentions on a mountain; the latter had lived through a war that allowed them to walk with grace and commitment at the very edge of death."

"But not one of them knew or guessed that if there were one man on Earth who knew better than anybody else that I was absurd it was myself."

“I know the room you’ve been crying in is called America. I know the door is not invented yet.”
from Beautiful Short Loser