Tal Taran > Recent Status Updates

“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

"Today the only thing left of the life of those days is what one needs to suffer hunger and cold. I am not even alive enough to know how to kill myself."

“It is lucky that it is not windy today.

Strange how in some way one always has the impression of being fortunate. How some chance happening, perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live.

It is raining, but it is not windy.”

“We had learnt of our destination with relief—Auschwitz—a name without significance at that time but it at least implied some place ‘on this earth’.”

“The parting, like the white fruit of an apple discolouring instantly around the bite, had begun three days before when they had met aboard the Rakuyo. Saying goodbye now entailed not a single new emotion.”

“Show up at work on time six months in a row and we’ll talk about red curry paste and lemongrass. Until then I have four words for you, ‘shut the f*ck up’.”

“I am an intelligent man. I read diverse and unusual books but I cannot understand which direction
—whether to live or shoot myself—I particularly want.”

“It’s very easy, doctor, to be a philosopher on paper but very hard to manage it in real life.”

“Why do you always wear black?

I’m in mourning for my life. I’m unhappy.”

“If a corporation takes a synthetic chemical and dumps it in your food, as a rule of thumb it’s not good.”

“Why do we never lead the life we have it within us to lead?”

“Life had proved a blind alley with a muck heap at the end of it and he must cut back and start again.”

“He had awoken too late for happiness but not for strength. And could feel an austere joy as of a warrior who is homeless but stands fully armed.”