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Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time. It is the world outside that box that gives me trouble.
Literature gives me life, and life kills me.
forced learning and magic are congenital adversaries.
Sleep, the lord of all gods and of all men.
Hypnos fades as Thanatos approaches.
We rarely consider that we’re also formed by the decisions we didn’t make, by events that could have happened but didn’t, or by our lack of choices, for that matter.
“Travel is a foretaste of Hell”),
There is none more conformist than one who flaunts his individuality.
I overlook dazzling thunderstorms worrying whether I have laundry hanging.
I have reached the age where life has become a series of accepted defeats—age and defeat, blood brothers faithful to the end.
aging without bitterness and with obvious resignation.
Boys’ dreams are mothers’ nightmares,
“Hell is the Other,”
“the torment of Hell is noise.”
I prefer slow conversations where words are counted like pearls, conversations with many pauses, pauses replacing words.
All untrue, all drawn with soft pencil, easily erasable, all attempts to explain the unexplainable.
I’m a failed narcissist.
No loss is felt more keenly than the loss of what might have been. No nostalgia hurts as much as nostalgia for things that never existed.
No nostalgia is felt as keenly as nostalgia for things that never existed.
Henri Matisse once said, “It has bothered me all my life that I do not paint like everybody else.”
“Every man guards in his heart a royal chamber,” wrote Flaubert. “I have sealed mine.”
Anyone who says the pen is mightier than the sword has never come face-to-face with a gun.
I had little time for a god who had little time for me.
There are things I just won’t do, as much as I want to, if I intend to live decently with myself afterward.
Many suggest that we close the circle as we age by growing childlike.
“All are dead, and ourselves left alone amidst a new generation whom we know not, and who know us not.”
Isn’t someone’s life more than a collection of scenes?
At the heart of most antagonisms are irreconcilable similarities. Hundred-year wars were fought over whether Jesus was human in divine form or divine in human form. Belief is murderous.
then war, the ultimate distraction, broke out.
I found the world inexplicable and impenetrable.
My soul is fate’s chew toy.
