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Why had she not driven off? Was she masturbating while listening to Brahms?
He doesn’t know it yet, but the infinity of childhood is brief.
Despite his excellent academic record, he always sits at the back of the class. His is a fragile kingdom.
The last remaining myth of Western civilization was that sex was something to do; something expedient, a diversion.
Children existed solely to inherit a man’s trade, his moral code and his property.
“I’m not saying she was ugly,” Bruno went on, “but her face was plain, charmless.
He took a notebook out of his pocket and recited the following verse: It’s always the same old shit of course, The eternal return, et cetera, And here I am eating raspberry mousse In a café called Zarathustra.
Unhappiness isn’t at its most acute point until a realistic chance of happiness, sufficiently close, has been envisioned.
Children suffer the world that adults create for them and try their best to adapt to it; in time, usually, they will replicate it.
“It’s a curious idea to reproduce when you don’t even like life.”
The world outside had its own rules, and those rules were not human.
Yet outside the strict confines of history, the ultimate ambition of this book is to salute the brave and unfortunate species which created us. This vile, unhappy race, barely different from the apes, which nevertheless carried within it such noble aspirations. Tortured, contradictory, individualistic, quarrelsome and infinitely selfish, it was sometimes capable of extraordinary explosions of violence, but never quite abandoned its belief in love. This species which, for the first time in history, was able to envision the possibility of its succession and, some years later, proved capable of
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