not an exit’s Reviews > Gemini > Status Update

“This is called sublimation.”FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK. HARDEST LAST LINE EVER.

“Everything is a sign, a dialogue, a conclave. Sky, earth and sea are talking together and each pursues its own monologue. Here I have found the answer to the question I was asking myself on the eve of the Icelandic Pentecost And this answer is magnificently simple: just as twinship has its own language— cryptophasia—so has dispaired twinship.” Just started actually crying

“Let no one try to take this pain away from me, for it is all I have. It strips me of everything, but I know that in it I must find everything again”

“When we have convinced ourselves that the disasters that have fallen on us have struck twenty, a hundred, a thousand generations before us, when we acknowledge that misfortune is always unimaginative, our pride will suffer, to be sure, but our hearts will be uplifted by a feeling of profound, of massive warmth and solidarity with our brethren in the blackness of time.”

“So the scholar in his humble home, the poet at his desk and the hermit in his cave can possess the whole universe at will. They have only to concentrate enough to disappear into the miniature garden, like the apothecary-genie into his gourd. Furthermore, by dwarfing the landscape, one acquires an increasing magical power. Evil is banished from it and its dwarf foliage breathes an eternal youth.”

“But this stone had so much spirit dwelling in it that it seeped out despite itself at every pore. It was riddled with it, ravined, pitted and grooved, it had valleys, gorges, gulfs, peaks and canyons. It listened and marked through a thousand ears, blinked and wept with a thousand eyes, laughed and sang with a thousand mouths. What was to happen, happened.”

“The fact is that the ordinary child, born without a twin, the single child, cannot get over his loneliness. He suffers from birth from an imbalance which will afflict him throughout his life but which in adolescence will direct him toward a solution, imperfect, lame, doomed to every kind of disaster but ultimately approved by society: marriage.”

“One of the chief reasons for having wars is undoubtedly to provide men with holidays.”

Wow. Chapter VI was one of the most beautifully written things I’ve ever read in my life. I had no idea what to expect when I picked up this book, but it certainly wasn’t some of the most lyrical and captivating prose I’ve ever encountered. What a good surprise.

“the corrosive atmosphere of the twinless condemned by their loneliness to dialectical loves attacks the pure metal of twinship. We ought not to grow old, did you know that? Aging is the deserved fate of the twinless who must one day make way for their children. As a sterile and eternal pair, united in a perpetual loving embrace, twins—if they remained pure— would be as changeless as the constellations.”