Quotes from book

Identity

“The eye… the point where a person's identity is concentrated.”

“For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.”

“Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's very beautiful. But what would they nourish their intimate talk with? However contemptible the world may be, they still need it to be able to talk together.”

“Pain doesn't listen to reason, it has its own reason, which is not reasonable.”

“… no one can do a thing about feelings, they exist and there's no way to censor them. We can reproach ourselves for some action, for a remark, but not for a feeling, quite simply because we have no control at all over it.”

“How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present?”

“She said: "I get scared when my eye blinks. Scared that during that second when my gaze is switched off, a snake or a rat or another man could slip into your place."”

“This is the real and the only reason for friendship: to provide a mirror so the other person can contemplate his image from the past, which, without the eternal blah-blah of memories between pals, would long ago have disappeared.”

“Since the insignificance of all things is our lot, we should not bear it as an affliction but learn to enjoy it.”

“I can't shake off the idea that after death you keep being alive. That to be dead is to live an endless nightmare.”

“It is always that way: between the moment he meets her again and the moment he recognizes her for the woman he loves, he has some distance to go.”

“No love can survive muteness.”

“He felt as if she no longer existed for him, had gone off somewhere, into some other life where, if he should meet her, he would no longer recognize her.”

“Today we're all alike, all of us bound together by our shared apathy toward work. That very apathy has become a passion. The one great collective passion of our time.”

“You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more.”

“As you live out your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom.”