- the love he bore this woman, with whom he had fallen in love several months befpre, was so precious to him that he tried to create an independent space for her in his life, a restricted zone of purity.
- love was not an extension of public life but its antithesis. it meant a longing to put himself at the mercy of his partner. he who gives himself up like a prisoner of war must give up his weapons as well. and deprived in advance of defense against a possible blow, he cannot help wonering when the blow will fall. ... love meant the constant expectation of a blow.
- all lovers unconsciously establish thier own rules of the game, which from the outset admit no transgression.
- a recapulation of time, a hymn to thier common past, a sentimental summary of an unsentimental story that was disappearing in the distance.
- semantic river: each time the same object would give rise to a new meaning, though all former meanings would resonate (like an echo, like a parade of echoes) together with the nre one. each new experience would sound, each time enriching the harmony.
- they failed to har the semantic susurrus of the river flowing through them.
- while people are fairly young and the musical composition of thier lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and exchange motifs..., but if they meet when thye are older..., thier musical composition are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.
woman
- what we have not chosen we cannot consider either out merit or our failure.
- value. not every woman was worthy of being called a woman.
- he felt himself unworthy of great a love, and felt he owed hew a low bow.
- fidelity gave a unity to lives that would otherwise splinter into thousands of split-second impressions.
- betrayal means breaking ranks. betrayal means breaking ranks and going off into the unknown.
- he considered music a liberating force: it liberated him from lonliness, introversion, the dust of the library; it opened the door of his body and allowed his soul to step out into the world to make friends.
- music was like a rose blooming on a boundless snow-covered plain of silence.
- noise has one advantage. it drowns out words.
- and what he yearened for that moment, vaguely but with all his might, was unbounded music, absolute sound, a pleasant and happy all-encompassing, over-powering, window-rattling din to engulf, once and for all, the pain, the futility, the vanity of words. music was the negation of sentences, music was the anti-world!
- seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which blinds, and total darkness.
- extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is veiled longing for death.
- that darkness was pure, perfect, thoughtless, visionless; that darkness was without end, without borders; the darkness was the infinite we each carry within us.
- but the larger a man grows in his own inner darkness, the more his outer form diminishes.
- darkness did not mean infinity; for her, it meant a duisagreement with what she saw, the negation of what was seen, the refusal to see.
- she had an overwhelming desire to tell him. like the most banal of women, don't let me go, hold me tight, make me your plaything, your slave, be strong! but they were words she could not say.
parades
- the idea of such a life made him feel suffocated. he yearned to step out of his life the way one steps out of a house into the street.
- it was as though she had found refuge inside a shell and the only sound she could hear was the sea of an inimical world.
- it's unintentional. it arose independent of human design, like a stalagmatic cavern. forms which are in themsleves wuite ugly turn up fortuitously, wothout design, in such incredible surroundings that they sparkle with a sudden wondrous poetry.
- before beauty disappears entirely from the earth, it will go on existing for a while by mistake. beauty by mistake---the final phase in the history of beauty.
- a children's ball, because the dead are as innocent as children. no matter how brutal life becomes peace always reigns in the cemetery.
- an object was ugly if she willed it ugly, beautiful if she willed it beautiful.
the old church in amsterdam
- beauty is a world betrayed. the only way we can encounter it is if its persecutors have overlooked it somewhere. beauty hides behind the scenes... if we want to find it, we must demolish the scenery.
- love means renouncing strength,
- the moment somone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies.
- living in truth meant breaking down the barriers between the private and the public.
- felt the strange incomprehensible ecstacy that void had evoked in him.
- everyone would follow the process from a greater or lesser distance, and she would be forced to playact before them all;
- the time she had wanted to go down on her knees before him and beg him to hold her, squeeze her, never let her go. she had longed to come to the end of the dangerous road of betrayals. she had longed to call a halt of it all.
- they could walk along silence without hearing their silence.
- what was important was the golden foorprint, the magic foorprint she had left on his life and no one could ever remove.
- he had always preferred the unreal to the real.
- invisible goddess... whose love he constantly feared losing.
- love is a battle. and i plan to go on fighting.
- love is a battle? well, i don't feel at all like fighting.
- when we wnat to give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives, we tend to use metaphors of heaviness. we say that something has become a great burden to us. we either bear the burden or fail and go down with it, we struggle with it, win or lose.
- her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. what fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.
- the goals we pursue are always veiled.
- the cemetery was vanity tranmogrified into stone.
- when graves are covered with stones, the dead can no longer get out.
- a gulf of misunderstanding had immediately opened between them.
- she was sorry to have been so impatient with him. perhaps if they had stayed together longer, Sabina and Franz would have begun to understand the words they used. gradually, timorously, thier vocabularies would have come together, like bashful lovers, and the music of one would have begun to intersect with the music of the other. but it was too late now.
- move on, and on again, beacuse were she had to die here thye would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.
