Yuan’s Reviews > The Book of Disquiet > Status Update

“Not even by painting my window with colourful dreams can I block out the noise of the life outside, oblivious to my gazing at it.”

“I can be what I want to be, but I have to want whatever it is. Success consists in being successful, not in having the potential for success.”

“Where is God, even if he doesn't exist? I want to pray and to weep, to repent of crimes I didn't commit, to enjoy the feeling of forgiveness like a caress that's more than maternal.”

“Rationalize my sadness? What for, if rationalization takes effort? Sad people can't make an effort. I can't even renounce those banal acts of life that I so abhor. To renounce is an effort, and I don't have it in me to make any effort.”

“The more a man differs from me, the more real he seems, for he depends that much less on my subjectivity.”

“What in me dies when I am?”

“And yet how often I've longingly envisioned this peace that I would now almost flee, if I could do so easily and gracefully!…And now that I'm here, feeling healthy and tired after a good long day, I'm restless, I feel trapped, I'm homesick.”

A simple invitation to have dinner with a friend produces an anguish in me that's hard to define. The idea of any social obligation whatsoever… disturbs my thoughts for an entire day,and sometimes I even start worrying the night before, so that I sleep badly. When it takes place, the dreaded encounter is utterly insignificant, justifying none of my anxiety, but the next time is no different: I never learn to learn.

“But all of this vanishes when I face someone in the flesh: I lose my intelligence, I can no longer speak, and after half an hour I just feel tired. Yes, talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial, and in them intelligence gleams like an image in a mirror.”