More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.
Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.
Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.
Abroad, she discovered that the transformation of music into noise was a planetary process by which mankind was entering the historical phase of total ugliness.
a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.
The beauty of New York rests on a completely different base. It’s unintentional. It arose independent of human design, like a stalagmitic cavern.
Before beauty disappears entirely from the earth, it will go on existing for a while by mistake.
the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful.
and in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.
People usually escape from their troubles into the future; they draw an imaginary line across the path of time, a line beyond which their current troubles will cease to exist.
the criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise.
When Tomas heard Communists shouting in defense of their inner purity, he said to himself, As a result of your “not knowing,” this country has lost its freedom, lost it for centuries, perhaps, and you shout that you feel no guilt?
what they seek in women is themselves, their ideal, and since an ideal is by definition something that can never be found, they are disappointed again and again.
“Some ideas have the force of a bomb exploding.”
Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
Either/or: either man was created in God’s image—and God has intestines!—or God lacks intestines and man is not like Him.
Kitsch is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements.
In the world of the Communist ideal made real, in that world of grinning idiots, she would have nothing to say, she would die of horror within a week.
True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.
Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short.
Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.
