Nic Sim > Recent Status Updates

a life of delight, remorse, pleasures ending in grief, troubles blossoming into joy, of systematic hypocrisy, the only restraint upon an otherwise unbridled love - a life of nervousness, anger, despair, jealousy, all of them paid for in full by one hour; but another hour would come and would swallow up the first and everything that went with it, leaving only the nervousness and the dregs, and the dregs of the dregs

Believe me, remembrance is the lesser evil. Let no one trust the happiness of the moment; there is in it a drop of gall. When time has gone by and the spasm has ended, then, if ever, one can truly enjoy the event; for, of these two illusions, the better is the one that can be experienced without pain.

What Momo could do better than anyone else, however, was — to listen. Now it would be wrong to suppose that that is something anyone can do. On the contrary, very few people really know how to listen.

…the recognition of any kingdoms, exclusive laws, frontiers, or territories is an indication of most savage ignorance; and that to go to war - that is to say, to kill people, people personally unknown to us, without any grounds is the most horrible villany, to which only a lost and perverted man, degraded to the level of a beast, can descend. I pictured to myself that all men believed this…

‘Now you have found your last wish,’ she said finally.
‘What you really and truly want is to love.‘

I was satisfied with these thoughts. I was pleased with everything, in those days, with my love, with my sadness, with the affection that I felt, with my own capacity to read, think, reflect in solitude.

He no longer wanted to be the greatest, strongest, or cleverest. He had left all that far behind. He longed to be loved just as he was, good or bad, handsome or ugly, clever or stupid, with all his faults - or possibly because of them.
But what was he actually like?
He no longer knew.

To be wise was to be above joy and sorrow, fear and pity, ambition and humiliation. It was to hate nothing and to love nothing, and above all to be utterly indifferent to the love and hate of others. A truly wise man attached no importance to anything. Nothing could upset him and nothing could harm him.

A person may think that the fate of people who are sufficiently remote does not touch him. Yet all of a sudden he will catch sight of them in an unexpected situation, will recognise their unsuspected likeness to him, whether it be beautiful or terrible, and he realises that not only have they touched him, but they have actually entered into him. This is what happens so long as life isn't totally extinct in a person.

But those without souls […] move through the world and subconsciously try to reshape it in their own image. They fill the streets, the squares, the stadiums and the department stores. When they burst into cheers over a winning goal, a successful pop song or a revolution it seems as if that roar would go on forever, but it is followed at once by the deathly silence of emptiness and oblivion.

„I have found another remark by Kafka on the mission of literature: What we need, he wrote, are books which strike us like the most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, books which would make us feel that we've been driven out into the forest far from another human being, like suicide. A book must be an axe for the frozen sea within us.“

I recently read an article in an American weekly about how fourteen complete idiots incapable of speech had learned "jerkish', a language of 225 words, developed in Atlanta for mutual communications between humans and chimpanzees. It occurred to me immediately that at last a language had been found in which the spirit of our age could speak,… the language of the future.

Like every man in love he invested the object of his adoration with excessive and deceptive hopes.

"Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering in order that they may have existence."

…living honestly comes in many different forms.

Whatever comes your way you must never interfere, because from this moment on your own opinion ceases to count. For that same reason you must go unarmed. You must let what happens happen. Everything must be equal in your eyes, good and evil, beautiful and ugly, foolish and wise. You may only search and inquire, never judge. Always remember that.

I wonder why people never say anything real.