Ana’s Reviews > The Woman in the Dunes > Status Update

'A man, more than a woman, tends to abandon himself to bits and pieces of things.'

'When he got to the surface, this endless moment would become a small flower pressed between the pages of his diary...poisonous herb or carnivorous plant, it would be no more than a bit of half-transparent colored paper, and as he sipped his tea in the parlor he would hold it up to the light and take pleasure in telling its story.'

'It would not be strange at all if "The Round-Trip Ticket Blues" were the song of mankind imprisoned.'

'Work seemed something fundamental for man, something which enabled him to endure the aimless flight of time.'

'More than iron doors, more than walls, it is the tiny peephole that really makes the prisoner feel locked in.'

'On that bed—with the other one—they had been a feeling man and woman, a watching man and woman; they had been a man who watched himself experiencing and a woman who watched herself experiencing; they had been a man watchung himself and a man watching a woman watching herself...'

'Perhaps it would be better to say that, rather than losing their passion, they had frozen it by over-idealizing it.'

'Although he may tell others of his hopes, he doesn't dream of them himself. He thinks of himself as worthless and either falls into masochistic loneliness or, failing that, ultimately becomes suspicious and pious, forever denouncing the eccentricities of others.'

'He wanted to believe that his own lack of movement had stopped all movement in the world, the way a hibernating frog abolishes winter.'

'No matter what they did, he mused, there was no escaping the law of the sand.'