Adri Woehler’s Reviews > Love and Garbage > Status Update

“Out of his isolation man can be liberated not only by love but also by hate. Hate is mistakenly regarded as the opposite of love, whereas in reality it stands alongside love and the opposite of both of them is loneliness. We often believe that we are tied to someone by love, and meanwhile we're only tied to them by hate, which we prefer to loneliness.”

“Her slight body ceaseless rears against mine, she trembles with delight, her eyes grow misty. Devoutly she begs me not to leave her, again and again she wants me, she knows no respite in love-making any more than in her work, any more than in anything she undertakes, she sweeps me along like a vortex, she rouses in me a strength I never suspected I had...”

So touching.
“And I said nothing, even though that evening I wanted to be with her, to stay with her, to shield her from the icy waters, whose roar I’d managed to hear myself at the moment of total silence. But who stay with my wife, who’d embrace her in the silence, which would enfold her? To whom would she turn when fear gripped her?”

“Saintliness had been invented by those who were afraid of life and real emotions. That’s why they elevated ecstatic rapture to something we should look up to, to something we should regard as a model.”

“The apocalypse can take different forms. The least dramatic, at first sight, is the one in which Man perishes under an avalanche of useless objects, emptied words, and excessive activity.”

“or prams.
I was reminded of the woman whose things I'd moved. She had a dead soul, she believed in Armageddon, and she took delight in things she'd saved from the dustbins. She probably used them to fill the emptiness that had remained within her after her soul had died….

Very interesting.
“What I am trying to say is that one can't indulge in love at any price. Like at the expense of others.
You think that's what we were doing?
You don't think so?
You are asking me? You who were always ready to sacrifice me?
As if I wasn't a human being at all, as if only she was one. Why don't you say something? You're angry now. Wait, wait a moment, surely you admit that you've always decided…

“I know that to remain with one’s past partner when one has come to like another person is considered weakness or even betrayal of ourselves and the person we now love.”

“ there is nothing by which person can justify a lie. It corrodes the soul just as much as indifference or hate. There are many ways of destroying one’s soul.”

“ she also wrote to me that she loved me to the point of feeling anguish and pain, that she experienced a terrible pain because I was not with her at this moment, just now on everything that was good in her was crying out to me.”