PART TWO: Soul and Body

• but when we ignore the body, we are more easily victimized by it.

• necessity knows no magic formulae---they are all left to chance. if love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assissi's shoulders.

• without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.

• dreaming is not merely an act of communication; it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself. our dreams prove that to imagine---to dream about things that have not happened---among mankind's deepest needs.

• vertigo is something other than the fear of failing. it is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.

• they exposed her powerlessness, which in turn led to vertigo, the insuperable longing to fall.

• she was in the grip of an insuperable longing to fall. she lived in constant state of vertigo.

• on the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth.

• what do you want me to do? i want you to be old. ten years older. twenty years older! what she meant was: i want you to be weak. as weak as i am.

• she was dependent on him for everything. what would happen to her here if he abandoned her? would she have to live her whole life in fear of losing him?

• in spite of thier love, they had made each other's life a hell. the fact that they loved each other was merely proof that the fault lay not in themselves, in thier behavior or inconstancy of feeling, but rather in their incompatibility: he was strong and she was weak.

• but when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak should be strong enough to leave.

• we might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. he is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down.

• she made no response. she could not tell him that she had been waiting for him.

• her first thought was that he had come back becuase of her; because of her, he had changed his destiny. now he would no longer be responsible for her; now she was responsible for him.

• it was not superstition, it was a sense of beauty that cured her of her depression and imbued her with a new will to live.
  

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