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

“It’s neither death nor life that I want: it’s that other thing shining in the depths of longing, like a possible diamond in a pit one can’t descend.”

“To see and feel makes me feel a great hope, but I realize that hope is literary. And I’m doomed always to feel, like the world’s great damned men, that it’s better to think than to live.”

“The sunset spreads over the scattered clouds that dot the entire sky. An immense calm hangs over the city, which is also growing calmer. Everything breathes beyond color and sound, in a deep and hushed sigh.”

“To achieve perfection would require a coldness foreign to man, and he would lose the human heart that makes him love perfection.”

“In prose, through transposition, we’re able to render everything. There is prose that dances, sings and recites to itself. Immortality depends on the grammarians.”

“All I want from life is to feel it being lost in these unexpected evenings. Another life, of city at nightfall. Towards the ocean, the light dies out in a livid white which is blued by greenish cold.”

“Let’s sit down here. From here we can see more of the sky. The vast expanse of these starry heights is soothing. Life hurts less as we look at them. Everything, finally, is destiny.”

“Blurry lights—I have the impression that I’ve known hours of every color, loves of every flavor. Throughout my life I lived to excess, and I was never enough for myself, not even in my dreams.”

“I’m enchanted by pure dreams, those which have no relation to reality. Long corridors and cracks around the windows. All I want from myself is to observe life.”

“A beach in the sun. Warmth in the cool breeze from across the sea. I love with my gaze, and not even in fantasy. My natural destiny is to be a visual lover of nature’s shapes and forms.”