More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Silence is a good weapon.
The children of this world are not only smarter, they are also more humane and more generous than the children of light.
It must be difficult to believe all that.
Marie is even less settled than I am, yet she seems bent on becoming so.
Nobody knew just what was happening.
I believe that the living are dead, and that the dead live, not the way Protestants and Catholics believe it. For
would have like to phone Henrietta, but the theologians have not yet invented this kind of dialing.
A hypocrite like that doesn’t even have to tell lies to be always on the right side of the fence.
For the outsider—and everyone in this world is an outsider in relation to everyone else—something always seems worse or better than it does for the one directly concerned, whether that something is good luck or bad luck, an unhappy love affair or an “artistic decline.”
I gave up talking long ago to anyone about money or art. When these two things meet, something is always wrong: art is either under- or overpaid.
even made a farewell speech “on the Mistaken Assumption that Graduation is Essential to Eternal Bliss.”
Catholics have no feeling whatever for detail.
One never knows what someone will do under ideological pressure,
False hopes, false modesty, false speculation on the unnatural.
“Stay away from St. Augustine: skillfully formulated subjectivity is not theology, not by a long shot, and it’s harmful to young souls. Nothing but journalism with a few dialectical features.
I would have liked to ask him whether my conception of Catholicism was correct. For me there were only four Catholics in the world: Pope John, Alec Guinness, Marie, and Gregory, an old negro boxer who had once nearly become world champion and who was now eking out a meagre living as a strong man in vaudeville.
“You’re just agreeing now out of laziness and not because you are convinced of the justness of abstract principles of order,” and I said, Yes, it was true I was doing it out of laziness and because I wanted to have her by me my whole life long, and I would even go over properly to the Catholic church if that was necessary in order to keep her.
was simply incapable of carrying on an ideological discussion.
“there is a point at which human beings, even if for ideological reasons—become human.”
have often noticed how wives are loyal to their husbands to the point of absolute madness.
Shortly afterwards Fredebeul arrived, with his fiancée, Monika Silvs and a certain Von Severn of whom, before he came, it was said that “although he had just converted he was very close to the Socialist Party,” which was evidently regarded as a terrific sensation. I
“Everything was fine with Marie as long as she was worried about my soul, but you people taught her to worry about her own soul, and now it’s got to the point where I, who have no sense of metaphysics, am worrying about Marie’s soul. When she marries Züpfner, then she will really be sinning. That much I have grasped of your metaphysics: what she is doing is fornication and adultery, and Prelate Sommerwild is acting the pimp.”
“That all sounds very funny when you stop to think that Heribert is so to speak the temporal eminence and Prelate Sommerwild the spiritual eminence of German Catholicism.”
What I find particularly embarrassing are films about artists. Most films about artists must be made by people who would have paid Von Gogh not even an ounce of tobacco for a picture but only half an ounce, and later would have regretted even that because they realized he would have sold it even for a pipeful of tobacco. In films about artists the suffering of the artistic soul, the poverty and the wrestling with the demon, are always put in the past. A living artist who has run out of cigarettes, can’t buy shoes for his wife, is of no interest to film people because three generations of
...more
(one thing is certain, anyone who collects art is not an artist).
in a child’s life there is a greatness in the banal, it is strange, random, always tragic. A
child, too, never takes time off as a child; time off does not begin until the “principles of order” have been accepted.
An artist is like a woman who can do nothing but love, and who succumbs to every stray male jackass.
“Yes,” he said, “entirely of her own free will, although conceivably in a conflict between the natural and the supernatural.” “And where does the
“I know this much,” I said, “that you Catholics are as hard on an unbeliever like me as the Jews are on the Christians, and the Christians on the heathen. All I ever hear is: law, theology—and when you come right down to it, this is all on account of a stupid bit of paper which the state—the state, mind you—has to issue.”
She was really jealous. I have often noticed that with Catholics: they guard their treasures … the sacraments, the Pope—like misers.
esthete
We had both been so frightened, had been separated for ages, we were too desperate