love&garbage
“…so they had invented the garden of paradise, which had in it everything they yearned for but lacked in their lives, and they had dreamed up creatures similar to themselves but equipped with wings.”
“I was not allowed to enter into life except as a guest, as a visitor, or as a day-wage labourer in selected jobs. Over those years there grew within me a longing for something to happen, something that would change my life, while at the same time my timidity…increased and made me shy away from any kind of change and from all strangers. Thus my home became for me both a refuge and a cage, I wanted to remain in it and yet also flee from it; to have the certainty that I would not be driven out and also the hope that I’d escape one day.”
“What depressed me were certainly not doubts about the rightness of my choice, but the knowledge that I’d made a decision once and for all. I suspected that for me the most blissful prospect was not so much having the person I loved permanently by my side as a need, from time to time, to reach out to emptiness, to let longing intensify within me to the point of agony, to alternate the pain of separation with the relief of renewed coming together, the chance of escape and return, of glimpsing before me a will-o’-the-wisp, the hope that the real encounter was still awaiting me.
Man is reluctant to accept that his life has come to a conclusion in that most important respect, that his hopes have been fulfilled. He hesitates to look death in the face, and there is little that comes so close to death as fulfilled love.”
“She’d run over to me but I had dissolved before her eyes.”
“…tears flushing the tenderness out of her eyes.”
“It also occurs to me that we live because there are a number of encounters ahead of us for the sake of which living is worthwhile.”
“I keep trying to lend the most complete and the most precise expression to what I have on my mind.”
“I never stopped conducting a silent argument with her.”
“Or perhaps even love …as a space for the soul to move in.”
“I thought …I could touch with my eyes what she was seeing just then.”
“…their words went past each other, their remarks slid past one another like the slippery bodies of fish, without making contact.”
“I am fighting against sleep, against the state when I shan’t be able to drive away the voice which begins to speak to me.”
“What speaks to a man in his dream is the secret or suppressed voice of his soul.… “But had I understood my soul’s voice correctly.”
“writing to him was prayer…what was prayer? … most probably it was a way of personal and sincere confession of anything on a person’s mind.”
“…the soul, which writhed in spasms unless one learned to listen to it and enclose and restrain it by one’s actions.”
“Am I to rejoice at the gift that’s been granted to me or am I to despair at my weakness, at being unable to resist the passion which is corroding me?”
“How can you live like that? Like what? So incompletely, so divided.”
“a book must be an axe for the frozen sea within us.”
… “whether we are not so pampered or so spoiled that we can no longer recognise honesty when we see it and stand before it in admiration.”
“We pity him for his loneliness, his vulnerability or his sick body. For the way he suffered, for being, compared to us, unhappy. We do not even perceive what that painful descent into the depth brings. The lonely diver sees in one instant what most of us who pity him don’t see in a whole lifetime.”
“I always had to escape from the reach of the black pit which I invariably saw before me as soon as I was quietly relaxing anywhere.”
“Sometimes I read to her aloud and she listened with the concentration of a person who did everything she did in life with total completeness.”
“I don’t know how or when I’ll end my struggle, but at that moment my soul is still capable of rising up, of making one last flight to where it belongs, to the place of its longings, to the regions of blissful paralysis from the proximity of a loved being; after that it will fly out to this battered and by now deserted little table, for a last time briefly smile with sudden relief, and then accept its fate.”
“…there is burning ambition in her, at the price of exhaustion if need be, to ensure that those who view her work go rigid.”
“this is where unconsciously we have wanted to come at moments of loneliness.”
“At the bottom of all our hope lies a yearning for encounter.”
“I don’t know why leaving someone should be a freer action than staying with them.”
“[on Kafka] His first love lasted for more than five years. He invited her to him, he drove her away again, he implored her not to leave him unless she wished to destroy him, and he implored her to leave him or they would destroy one another. He got engaged to her and immediately afterwards he fled from her. When she kept silent and failed to answer his letters he lamented his fate and begged for a single word of favour. Encounter, coming close together with a woman he loved was for him a chance of fulfilling his life, a chance he persistently missed. The struggle he was waging with himself totally consumed and exhausted him.”
“Kafka with his shyness sought a way of communicating his torment and simultaneously concealing it.”
“But I was being called back by that voice to ancient longings which were not linked to her…”
“Man is afraid to attain what he longs for, just as subconsciously he longs for what he is afraid of. We are afraid we might lose the person we love. To avoid losing that person we drive him or her away.”
“a person who wants to live honestly chooses torture.”
“you’ve grown painfully into me.”
