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“The very things that his sense of dignity had made him ignore up to now had suddenly gained the power to humiliate him.”

…Dreams, memories, the sacred-they are all alike in that they are beyond our grasp. Once we are even marginally separated from what we can touch, the object is sanctified; it acquires the beauty of the unattainable, the quality of the miraculous. Everything, really, has this quality of sacredness, but we can desecrate it at a touch. How strange man is! His touch defiles and yet he contains the source of miracles."

"They retreat into enclaves of privacy and erect more and more barriers to any public contact in order to preserve their private worlds. But by doing so, they play right into the hands of the structure they believe they are opposing. They accept that they have a private world and a private being to treasure. But one cannot defeat the privatization of the world by retreating into privacy."

"The capitalist subject oscillates between dissatisfaction and pleasure, between absence and presence, and it cannot recognize the satisfaction that underlies this oscillation. This subject remains, however, a subject animated by a lost object. As such, it derives its satisfaction from the series of failures to arrive at the pleasure it seeks. "

“For you are willing to keep silent about one reign of terror in order the better to combat another one. There are some of us who do not want to keep silent about anything. It is our whole political society that nauseates us.“

“I share with you the same revulsion from evil. But I do not share your hope, and I continue to struggle against this universe in which children suffer and die.”

...In this sense, an image of the end of capitalism is implicit in its structure, and the key to capitalism’s staying power lies in the fact that this ultimately satisfying object doesn’t exist.”

"The psyche satisfies itself through the failure to realize its desire, and capitalism allows the subject to perpetuate this failure, all the while believing in the idea that it pursues success.”

“The essence of capitalism is accumulation”

“Capitalist accumulation envisions obtaining the object that would provide the ultimate satisfaction for the desiring subject, the object that would quench the subject’s desire and allow it to put an end to the relentless yearning to accumulate...

Capitalism =/= culture

“Culture gives the subject a sense of belonging that capitalism does not”

“The capitalist subject constantly experiences its failure to belong, which is why the recurring fantasy within capitalism is that of attaining some degree of authentic belonging... Though capitalism spawns the type of fantasy, it constantly militates against the fantasy’s realization”

“The staying power of capitalism, its resistance to critique, is inextricable from its production of sublimity, which gives it the power to satisfy. Capitalist subjects cling tightly to their dissatisfaction, and the dissatisfaction is the main thing holding them to capitalism. No matter how attractive it appears, there is no commodity that holds the appeal of a lasting dissatisfaction.”

Book “tries to understand why so much satisfaction accompanies capitalism and thus what constitutes its hold on those living within its structure.”

Starting point: “capitalism’s relationship to desiring subjectivity”

Next chapters: “how capitalism protects us; but it does enable use to experience the sublime in everyday life.”

First letter of Letters to a German Friend was excellent. Love Camus

“I thought that this cough might also prove useful. I added a couple of extra, exaggerated coughs for good measure and, my mouth still covered by the handkerchief, I glanced at the district attorney's face.
The next instant he asked with his quiet smile,
"Was that real?"
Even now the recollection makes me feel so embarrassed I can't sit still.”

“But it lasted only one night. In the morning, when I woke and got out of bed, I was again the shallow poseur of a clown. The weak fear happiness itself. They can harm themselves on cotton wool.
Sometimes they are wounded even by happiness. I was impatient to leave her while things still stood the same, before I got wounded, and I spread my wual smokescreen of farce.”

“People talk of "social outcasts." The words apparently denote the miserable losers of the world, the vicious ones, but I feel as though I have been a "social outcast" from the moment I was born. If ever I meet someone society has designated as an outcast, 1 invariably feel affection for him, an emotion which carries me away in melting tenderness.”

“Everything he said seemed exceedingly obvious, and undoubtedly true, but I felt sure that something more obscure, more frightening lurked in the hearts of human beings. Greed did not cover it, nor did vanity. Nor was it simply a combination of lust and greed. I wasn't sure what it was, but I felt that there was something inexplicable at the bottom of human society which was not reducible to economics.”

“To show off his "modernity" (I can't think of any other reason) Horiki also took me one day to a secret Communist meeting. (I don't remember exactly what it was called—a "Reading Society," I think.) A secret Communist meeting may have been for Horiki just one more of the sights of Tokyo. I was introduced to the "comrades" and obliged to buy a pamphlet…”

Absolutely love the section that starts with this

Libby sucks. Horrible sister.

She hid that she was anemic during pregnancy from her sister? Twice? What a dumb storyline.

“Only he who has separated time from existence lives this drama: fleeing the latter, he is crushed by the for-mer. And he feels how time, like death, gains ground.”

“A little knowledge is delightful; a lot, disgusting. The more you know, the less you want to know. He who has not suffered from knowledge has never known anything.”

“Substituting for our subjective plight an objective one, we hope to lighten our burden and avoid the reproaches which we should in fact address to our-selves. But such objectification actually deepens our unhappiness and, presenting it as cosmic fatality, shuts off any possibility of lessening it or of making it more bearable.”

“Self-control and sustained inner effort are required in order to diminish unhappiness. All efforts to attain happiness, on the other hand, are entirely futile.”

“As for Christianity, it knows no love: it only knows forbearance or compassion, allusions to love rather than love itself.”

“Love born in suffering hides too many tears and sighs not to have its rays stained by a bitter clarity. There is too much torment, renunciation, and anxiety in this love for it to be anything but infinite forbearance. You forgive everything, you accept everything, you justify everything. But is this still love? How can one love when one is removed from everything?”

“All men have the same defect: they wait to live, for they have not the courage of each instant. Why not invest enough passion in each moment to make it an eternity? We all learn to live only when we no longer have anything to expect, because we do not live in the living present but in a vague and distant future.”

“Sometimes I am overcome and I would prefer to forget all. Interiorization leads to inner collapse, because the world penetrates you and crushes you with its overbearing weight. Is it surprising, then, that some would have recourse to anything-from vulgarity to art—in order to forget?
I HAVE No ideas, only obsessions. Anybody can have ideas. Ideas have never caused anybody's downfall.