Nabila Tabassum Chowdhury > Recent Status Updates

"(oh yes, my God, the memory of revulsion is stronger than the memory of tenderness!)"

"We should not try to replace one type of power with another, we should repudiate the very principle of power and repudiate it everywhere."

"Someone who writes books is either everything (a unique universe in himself and to all others) or nothing. And because it will never be given to anyone to be everything, all of us who write books are nothing. We are unrecognized, jealous, embittered, and we wish the others dead. In that we are all equals: Banaka, Bibi, I, and Goethe."

"(Yes, I realize you don’t know what I’m talking about, because beauty vanished long ago. It vanished under the surface of the noise—the noise of words, the noise of cars, the noise of music—we live in constantly. It has been drowned like Atlantis. All that remains of it is the word, whose meaning becomes less intelligible with every passing year.)”

"The invention of printing formerly enabled people to understand one another. In the era of universal graphomania, the writing of books has an opposite meaning: everyone surrounded by his own words as by a wall of mirrors, which allows no voice to filter through from outside."

"the absence of dramatic social changes in the nation’s internal life. (From this point of view, it seems to me symptomatic that in France, where practically nothing happens, the percentage of writers is twenty-one times higher than in Israel."

"That conversation with the taxi driver suddenly made clear to me the essence of the writer’s occupation. We write books because our children aren’t interested in us. We address ourselves to an anonymous world because our wives plug their ears when we speak to them.”

"“Since James Joyce,” he said, “we have known that the greatest adventure of our lives is the absence of adventure.”"

"“All anyone can do,” said Banaka, “is give a report on oneself. Anything else is an abuse of power. Anything else is a lie.”"

"Because if the tottering structure of her memories collapses like a clumsily pitched tent, all that Tamina will be left with is the present, that invisible point, that nothingness moving slowly toward death."

"The phrase “It’s absolutely the same with me, I …” seems to be an approving echo, a way of continuing the other’s thought, but that is an illusion: in reality it is a brute revolt against a brutal violence, an effort to free our own ear from bondage and to occupy the enemy’s ear by force."

"That desire has remained with me, captive like a bird in a sack, a bird that from time to time awakens and flutters its wings."

"I had always been very fond of the young woman, in the most innocent, least sexual way possible. It was as if her body were always perfectly concealed behind her radiant intelligence and, as well, behind the modesty of her behavior and the tastefulness of her clothes."

"And I ran after that voice through the streets so as not to lose sight of the splendid wreath of bodies gliding over the city, and I realized with anguish in my heart that they were flying like birds and I was falling like a stone, that they had wings and I would never have any."

"They were all smiling, and Éluard leaned over a girl he had his arm around: “A man possessed by peace is always smiling.”"

"I wandered through the streets of Prague, rings of laughing, dancing Czechs swirled around me, and I knew that I did not belong to them but belonged to Kalandra, who had also come loose from the circular trajectory and had fallen, fallen, to end his fall in a condemned man’s coffin, but even though I did not belong to them, I nonetheless watched the dancing with envy and yearning, unable to take my eyes off them."

"...we always had something to celebrate, an anniversary or some other event, old injustices were redressed, new injustices were perpetrated..."

"That is how the photographer saw them, and he brought out an eloquent contrast: on one side, the police in the false unity (imposed, commanded) of the row, on the other, the young people in the true unity (sincere and natural) of the circle; on this side, the police in the sullen posture of lying in wait, and on that one, those who are delighting in play."

"I think I understand them: they have the impression that the circle they are describing on the ground is a magical circle uniting them like a ring. And their chests swell with an intense feeling of innocence: they are united not by marching, like soldiers or fascist formations, but by dancing, like children. What they are trying to spit in the cops’ faces is their innocence."

"Nowadays we don’t even realize that the same external display serves two absolutely opposed internal attitudes. There are two laughters, and we have no word to tell one from the other."

"...whereas the devil’s laughter denoted the absurdity of things, the angel on the contrary meant to rejoice over how well ordered, wisely conceived, good, and meaningful everything here below was."

"With a horoscope we can indeed wonderfully influence, even direct, people’s behavior. We can advise them to do certain things and warn them against doing others, and induce them into humility by acquainting them with the disasters in their future."

"Yes, as the years went by, man and wife became twins, with the same vocabulary, the same ideas, the same destiny."

"The important thing was not what the conversation was but what it represented"

"O lovers! Be careful in those dangerous first days! Once you’ve brought breakfast in bed you’ll have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal."

"Putting it another way: every love relationship rests on an unwritten agreement unthinkingly concluded by the lovers in the first weeks of their love. They are still in a kind of dream but at the same time, without knowing it, are drawing up, like uncompromising lawyers, the detailed clauses of their contract."

"She had seen Mama at the time the way a child sees an adult, but now the roles were reversed: Marketa was the adult and, from that great distance, Mama appeared to her small and defenseless as a child. Marketa felt an indulgent patience toward her, and had even started to write to her regularly."

"Though as the years passed Mama did indeed stay the same, Marketa probably changed, because she suddenly had the impression that whatever her mother-in-law had done to them was actually innocuous and that it was she, Marketa, who had committed the real offense in giving such importance to her grumbling."

"We want to be masters of the future only for the power to change the past. We fight for access to the labs where we can retouch photos and rewrite biographies and history."

"Mirek rewrote history just like the Communist Party, like all political parties, like all peoples, like mankind. They shout that they want to shape a better future, but it’s not true. The future is only an indifferent void no one cares about, but the past is filled with life, and its countenance is irritating, repellent, wounding, to the point that we want to destroy or repaint it."