Trust

by Hernan Diaz

What all tendencies, branches and splinters of anarchism—and there are quite a few—have in common is their opposition to every form of hierarchy and inequality. It should not be surprising, then, that there are no extensive records of the movement, since the institutional order required to keep such records was in obvious contradiction with the movement’s tenets.

he wanted to turn her into a completely unremarkable, safe character—just like the wives in the autobiographies of the Great Men I read during that time to come up with Bevel’s voice. Put her in her place.

He forced her into the stereotype of fated heroines throughout history, made to offer the spectacle of their own ruin. Put her in her place.

What I experienced at that moment remains, to this day, the standard by which I measure hatred.

it was this strange paradox of being in private in public that felt so opulent—a feeling that was one with the illusion of suddenly having become untouchable and invulnerable, with the fantasy of being in total control of myself, of others and of the city as a whole.

But once this illusory public interest is at work, people forget an all-important distinction: that my needs, desires and cravings may mirror yours does not mean we have a shared goal. It merely means we have the same goal. This is a crucial difference. I will only cooperate with you as long as it serves me. Beyond that, there can only be rivalry or indifference.”

Later, over the years, both at work and in my personal life, I have had countless men repeat my ideas back to me as if they were theirs—as if I would not remember having come up with those thoughts in the first place.

a fortune seldom has one single owner. Many interests and parties are tied to it. Rather than a block of granite, wealth resembles a river basin with multiple tributaries and branches.

But after looking at her papers and learning how profoundly different she was from the “accessible” character her husband asked me to create, I find it hard to forgive myself for having helped him perpetrate that fiction, even if it remained unfinished and unpublished.

All of life’s peculiarities result from a long series of mutations.

Nature is always less gaudy than I remember it. It has much better taste than I.

Nothing more private than pain. It can only involve one. But who? Who is “I” in “I hurt”? The one who inflicts the pain or the one who suffers it? And does “hurt” refer to the inflicting or the suffering?

“The sunset looks like a painting!” Because artifice is now the ultimate standard, the original (sunset) has to be turned into a fake (painting), so that the latter may provide the measure of the former’s beauty.

It’ll be rather lovely once it fades.

For I’ve come to think one is truly married only when one is more committed to one’s vows than the person they refer to.

I distrust the surge of well-being within me when I make him feel good.

God is the most uninteresting answer to the most interesting questions.