Quotes from book

The Trouble With Being Born

“"What's wrong - what's the matter with you?" Nothing, nothing's the matter, I've merely taken a leap outside my fate, and now I don't know where to turn, what to run for…”

“The unfortunate thing about public misfortunes is that everyone regards himself as qualified to talk about them.”

“Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? Where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.”

“All my life, I have lived with the feeling that I have been kept from my true place. If the expression "metaphysical exile" had no meaning, my existence alone would afford it one.”

“There is nothing to say about anything. So there can be no limit to the number of books.”

“Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise.”

“Obviously God was a solution, and obviously none so satisfactory that will ever be found again.”

“I have all the defects of other people yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.”

“Once we reject lyricism, to blacken a page becomes an ordeal: what's the use of writing in order to say exactly what we had to say?”

“I think of so many people who are no more, and I pity them. Yet they are not so much to be pitied, for they have solved every problem, beginning with the problem of death.”

“It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition.”

“As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy.”

“Say what we will, death is the best thing nature has found to please everyone. With each of us, everything vanishes, everything stops forever. What an advantage, what an abuse! Without the least effort on our part, we own the universe, we drag it into our own disappearance. No doubt about it, dying is immoral…”

“I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass — which is better than trying to fill them.”

“Nothing deserves to be undone, doubtless because nothing deserved to be done.”

“We make choices, decisions, as long as we keep to the surface of things; once we reach the depths, we can neither choose nor decide, we can do nothing but regret the surface…”

“God is what survives the evidence that nothing deserves to be thought.”

“Fear is the antidote to boredom: the remedy must be stronger than the disease.”

“Without the faculty of forgetting, our past would weigh so heavily on our present that we should not have the strength to confront another moment, still less to live through it. Life would be bearable only to frivolous natures, those in fact who do not remember.”