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because, in our morbid attempt to prevent time from ending, to cause what is over to return, we will be letting that other time slip past us as if it were not ours.
We pour all our intelligence and our feelings and our enthusiasm into the task of discriminating between things that will all be made equal, if they haven’t already been, and that’s why we’re so full of regrets and lost opportunities, of confirmations and reaffirmations and opportunities grasped, when the truth is that nothing is affirmed and everything is constantly in the process of being lost. Or perhaps there never was anything.
she also felt threatened by and concerned about the loss of her future, or by its sudden arrival.
It was simply a matter of accepting the belief or superstition that what one doesn’t say doesn’t exist.
global vacillation and carry on like that indefinitely. All people really want to do is to sleep, the thought of future regrets would paralyse us, imagining the consequences of acts we haven’t even committed is always dreadful, that’s why we politicians are so necessary, we’re here in order to take the decisions that others would never take, immobilized as they are by their doubts and their lack of will.
‘The sleeping and the dead are but as pictures,’ Shakespeare said and I sometimes think that that’s all people are, paintings, asleep today and dead tomorrow.
Going out, talking, doing, moving, looking and hearing and being seen all place us at constant risk, not even closeting ourselves at home and sitting very still can save us from the consequences, from those logical and unavoidable situations, from what is today imminent and from what, almost a year ago, or even four or ten or one hundred years ago, or even yesterday, is so unexpected.
“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
the possibility, that the apparent age and appearance of a person can depend on whoever happened to take an interest in them and on having money.
It’s always the most conventional things that contain the largest measure of madness.
The mouth is always full, abundance itself.
It’s rather that being with someone consists in large measure in thinking out loud, that is, in thinking everything twice rather than once, once with your thoughts and again when you speak, marriage is a narrative institution.
The events and thoughts of others are transmitted too, those they’ve confided to us in private, that’s where the expression “pillow talk” comes from, there are no secrets between people who share a bed, the bed is like a confessional.
they forget that having found something out, everything changes, the skin opens, something tears.
that’s the one advantage of repetition, it distorts everything and makes it familiar, what repels you in real life you end up finding attractive if you see it often enough on the TV screen.
Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t be better if we all just stayed very still, if we were dead, after all it’s the only thing that, deep down, we all want, the one future idea we’re gradually accustoming ourselves to, and about which there can be no doubts, no anticipated regrets.”
The truth never shines forth, as the saying goes, because the only truth is that which is known to no one and which remains untransmitted, that which is not translated into words or images, that which remains concealed and unverified, which is perhaps why we do recount so much or even everything, to make sure that nothing has ever really happened, not once it’s been told.
watching the other person’s mouth, pouring the wine, being polite, lighting cigarettes, laughing, sometimes laughter is the prelude to a kiss and the expression of desire, its mode of transmission, without one quite knowing why, laughter disappears afterwards during the kiss and the fulfilment of the desire, there’s rarely any laughter when two people lie awake in one another’s arms, their heads on the pillow, no longer watching the other person’s mouth (the mouth is always full, abundance itself), there’s a tendency to seriousness, however full of laughter the prologues and interruptions
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Keeping silent and speaking are ways of intervening in the future.
Nothing is ever enough when you’re waiting, something needs to be ripped asunder with a sharpened blade or burned with a lighted cigarette or a flame, nothing is ever enough after the disparagement and the abjuration and the disdain, afterwards you can only allow yourself the next inevitable step, the suppression, cancellation or death of the person expelled from the territory delineated by the pillow.
It was clear that he was a man of talent, being able to move so swiftly from smugness to depression without appearing false or insincere.
Some people are like that all their lives, eternally young, a great misfortune. We all tell stories, we talk, speak, words are cheap, and sometimes they pour out of us unrestrained.
It’s strange that words don’t have worse consequences than they do. Or perhaps we just don’t see it, we just think they don’t have any consequences and, in fact, the world’s in a permanent state of disaster because of what we’ve said.
I was married, we saw each other a few times in secret, but it was all very sad, it made her sad, she couldn’t see any possible solution, and the fact that she couldn’t made me sad too, sadder than the certain fact that there was no solution.
whether feigned or not, nothing is as exhausting as grief.
I lit a cigarette, I didn’t understand what I’d done although I knew that I’d done it, sometimes those are two different things.
being born depends on a movement, a gesture, a phrase spoken at the other end of the world.
grief and fear are not fleeting emotions,
