Rose

“I could have kept silent for ever, but we believe that the more we love someone, the more secrets we should tell them, teling often seems like a gift, the greatest gift one can give, the greatest loyalty, the greatest proof of love and commitment. You're rewarded for telling secrets. It isn't enough just to speak, to utter fiery words that are soon extinguished or even become repetitive. Nor are they enough for the person listening. The person speaking is as insatiable as the person who listens, the person speaking wants to hold the attention of the other for ever, wants to penetrate as deeply with his tongue as he can ("the tongue as raindrop, the tongue in the ear," I thought) and the person listening wants to be kept entertained, wants to hear and know more and more, even things that are invented or false. Perhaps Teresa didn't or rather would have preferred not to know. But I blurted something out to her, I didn't control myself, not enough, and then she couldn't go on not wanting to know, she wanted to know, she had to listen.”
― Javier Marías, A Heart So White

“Tôi thấy khó thật, đi trong phố thì dễ, đi trong đời khó hơn triệu lần. Đi trong thành phố, dù là thành phố lạ, rẽ vào ngã tư rất dễ. Ngã tư trong thành phố nào, cũng sờ sờ là ngã tư. Có rẽ nhầm, cũng quay lại được. Ngã tư trong đời khác, đời không cho quay lại, không có cách gì quay lại. Đời nghiệt ngã. Đời lằng nhằng, ngã tư đời do đó, lờ mờ và loằng ngoằng. Đời di động, ngã tư đời do đó di chuyển trong cuộc đời, không lúc nào iên.”
― Trần Dần, Những ngã tư và những cột đèn

“Let’s say that the average age in the audience is twenty-five years. Six hundred times twenty-five equals fifteen thousand years of human experience assembled in that darkness—well over twice the length of recorded human history of hopes, dreams, disappointments, exultation, tragedy. All focused on the same series of images and sounds, all brought there by the urge, however inchoate, to open up and experience as intensely as possible something beyond their ordinary lives.”
― Walter Murch, In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing

“Sometimes I have the feeling that nothing that happens happens, that everything happened and at the same time didn't, because nothing happens without interruption, nothing lasts or endures or is ceaselessly remembered, and even the most monotonous and routine of existences gradually cancels itself out, negates itself in its apparent repetitiveness until nothing is anything and no one is anyone they were before, and the weak wheel of the world is pushed along by forgetful beings who hear and see and know what is not said, never happens, is unknowable and unverifiable. Sometimes I have the feeling that what takes place is identical to what doesn't take place, what we dismiss or allow to slip by us identical to what we accept and seize, what we experience identical to what we never try, and yet we spend our lives in a process of choosing and rejecting and selecting, in drawing a line to separate these identical things and make of our story a unique story that we can remember and that can be recounted, either now or at the end of time, and thus be erased or swept away, the annulment of everything we are and do. We pour all our intelligence and our feelings and our enthusiasm into the task of discriminating between things that will all be made equal, if they haven't already been, and that's why we're so full of regrets and lost opportunities, of confirmations and reaffirmations and opportunities grasped, when the truth is that nothing is affirmed and everything is constantly in the process of being lost. There's no such thing as a whole or perhaps there never was anything.”
― Javier Marías, A Heart So White