100 Books You Must Read Before You Die - volume 1 [newly updated] [The Great Gatsby, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Count of Monte Cristo, Les Misérables, ... (The Greatest Writers of All Time)

by Book House

Human contact wears things out with disheartening slowness.

Was I happy? Yes, I had nothing to mourn or regret, I had no complicated desires. Therefore, I was happy. I remembered that since my childhood I had had spiritual illuminations, mystical emotions, a morbid fondness for shutting myself up face to face with my past. I had attributed exceptional importance to myself and had come to think that I was more than other people. But this had gradually become submerged in the positive nothingness of every day.

As for philosophical discussions, I thought they are absolutely useless. You cannot demonstrate or verify anything. What was truth, anyway?

the gaze by which I enter into myself as into a tomb.

You can no more look destiny in the face than you can look at the sun, and yet destiny is grey.

I desecrated her solitude with my eyes, but she did not know it, and so she was not desecrated.

A young girl looked at me with vague blue eyes. What could I do against that kind of sapphire?

saw that they wanted to kill the past. When we are old, we let it die; when we are young and strong, we kill it.

We can no more know our first glance of love than our last.

“What a life I led! What monotony, what emptiness! The little town, our house, the drawing-room with the furniture always arranged just so, their places never changed, like tombstones. One day I tried to put the table that stood in the centre in another place. I could not do it.”

He seemed to be one of those gentle people who think too much and do evil.

“Nothing ever happened to me, nothing ever would happen to me. There was nothing for me. The future no longer existed for me. If my days were to go on like that, nothing would separate me from my death — nothing! Not a thing! To be bored is to die! My life was dead, and yet I had to live. It was suicide. Others killed themselves with poison or with a revolver. I killed myself with minutes and hours.” “Amy!” said the man. “Then, by dint of seeing the days born in the morning and miscarrying in the evening, I became afraid to die, and this fear was my first passion.

“Religion? It is not with religion that we fill the emptiness of our days, it is with our own life. It was not with beliefs, with ideas that I had to struggle, it was with myself.

“Sin, sin! To rid myself of boredom by committing a crime, to break up monotony by deceiving. To sin in order to be a new person, another person. To hate life worse than it hated me. To sin so as not to die.

She added: “We deceive ourselves a good deal about love. It is almost never what they say it is.

“Even in the purest of loves we cannot escape from ourselves.”

She generally gave herself very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it), and sometimes she scolded herself so severely as to bring tears into her eyes; and once she remembered trying to box her own ears for having cheated herself in a game of croquet she was playing against herself, for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people. ‘But it’s no use now,’ thought poor Alice, ‘to pretend to be two people! Why, there’s hardly enough of me left to make one respectable person!’

Man is the vainest of all creatures that have their being upon earth.