Berlin Quotes

“I expected my suffering to feel redemptive in some way. I thought life was meant to be meaningful, even when it was hard.
I wanted to tell her that I was unhappy, but that my unhappiness had no noble cause, and was nearly entirely of my own making. It was slow, insidious self-destruction”
― Bea Setton, Berlin

“I worried that I didn’t know how to play the glorious possibilities of the hand I’d been dealt. Someone else would make great use of this characterful nose, the desire to please, would know what to do with my kind family, great education, and my sympathetic nature. All these gifts had gone largely wasted on me. But it was complicated, this feeling I had, as the sparks melted into a confusion of light – because while I did envy other people for being them, I pitied them for never getting to be me.”
― Bea Setton, Berlin

“I developed a much greater attachment to the scar that formed around our break-up than to his actual person.”
― Bea Setton, Berlin

“I told her how the predominant state of my early twenties was loneliness, how it all often felt like a fake life, how I couldn’t escape the feeling that my real, good life was happening somewhere else, and how frightened I was that I might never find out where, and that I’d miss the whole thing loitering off stage.”
― Bea Setton, Berlin

“I held the mistaken belief that if someone truly valued me, they would care for me more than I cared for myself.”
― Bea Setton, Berlin

“I was basically living the chaste life of a nun, except without any of the convivial community aspects of being in a convent.”
― Bea Setton, Berlin

“I thought, time will keep moving past me. Even if I remain as immobile as a paperweight, time will still stack up the days and pin the receipts of all of them to me until I find myself with a thick wad of them in my forties, and a hefty pile in my sixties. I’m sure they’ll tot up to something that feels weighty and satisfying, and that I’ll feel rich at the end – no matter how impoverished my days actually were”
― Bea Setton, Berlin

“Nothing that will loom large in the retrospective of my life, nothing I will remember much longer – just the kind of routine negligence and behaviour that slowly taints everything. I was ruining my life a little every day, and although I see now that these things were redeemable, I’ve always found starting on a clean page more inviting than amending an imperfect first attempt.”
― Bea Setton, Berlin

“How little I'd really take advantage of the city, how little I'd achieved. I never went to a club, I never barbecued, I never went bowling or swimming in a lake. I'd just stewed in the fetid air of my own bell jar.”
― Bea Setton, Berlin

“How I couldn't escape the feeling that my real, good life was happening somewhere else and how frightened I was that I might never find out where”
― Bea Setton, Berlin

“I've lied because I found people's desire to know the truth invasive and their assumption I would tell the truth presumptive. People think they are entitled to honest answers, but I've never been very honest because I don't want to be depressing.”
― Bea Setton, Berlin

“I wasn’t brave enough for acts of vigilante justice or true revenge. But self-destruction was much easier.”
― Bea Setton, Berlin

“I’ve lied because I found people’s desire to know the truth invasive and their assumption I would tell the truth presumptive. People think they are entitled to honest answers, but I’ve never been very honest because I don’t want to be depressing.”
― Bea Setton, Berlin

“Our relationship was sustained by a deliberate process of mutual orientalization: we exaggerated differences, saw each other through a veil of appealing clichés and outdated cultural paradigms. (...) Milosh reflexively, unthinkingly did what I find hardest: he accepted reality with ease and grace. He committed to and invested in his real life without fantasizing about the one he ought to be living.”
― Bea Setton, Berlin

“At the time I couldn’t tell whether his silence was a reflection of inner depth, or just a sign that he was dumb as a box of bricks.”
― Bea Setton, Berlin

“Because I am so inelegant, everyone always assumes that I’m ‘relaxed’, that I don’t care how I look. I pretend to be above ‘style’ and ‘fashion’, but the truth is I am just incapable of it. I mind terribly about my appearance but am helpless to improve it. I try to plan nice, respectable outfits, but when I look in the mirror, I usually find myself grotesque. Nothing I wear looks as though it belongs to me. Often it actually doesn’t.”
― Bea Setton, Berlin

“How I actually spent my time was immaterial, because eventually I could tell whatever story I fancied about those years of ‘joyfully misspent youth’. That kind of self-denial is nearly a skill”
― Bea Setton, Berlin

“souls are not re-cast with a change of decor”
― Bea Setton, Berlin

“While it is important to seem charmingly engrossed in one’s own world, one must not look unapproachable.”
― Bea Setton, Berlin

“I’ve never been very good at ‘going with it’. I don’t think I ever fully immerse myself in anything. My body is in the stream, true, but I’ve always got my head a little above the water. I’m always looking down at myself, watching how my legs thrash about, and how the fish and weeds flow all around me.”
― Bea Setton, Berlin

“People always say that the most important moments usually glide by unremarked upon, as invisible as fish in a flowing stream. You don’t notice them at the time, they say, you’re too busy going with it. But I don’t find this to be true.”
― Bea Setton, Berlin

“The seeds of greater things were latent in me somewhere, just waiting to bloom.”
― Bea Setton, Berlin