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He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn't really ...more

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Perhaps grief, which destroys all patterns, destroys even more: the belief that any patterns exist. But we cannot, I think, survive without such belie...more

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And what percentage of people take up the option to die off?’ She looked at me, her glance telling me to be calm. ‘Oh, a hundred per cent, of course. ...more

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And perhaps it was also the case that, for all a lifetime's internal struggling, you were finally no more than what others saw you as. That was your n...more

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Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what poi...more

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When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don't ...more

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Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised ...more

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Remember the botched brothel-visit in L’Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the...more

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Mariac tells us about the books he's read, the painters he's liked, the plays he's seen. He finds himself by looking in the works of others. He define...more

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There is a grotesquerie to grief as well. You lose the sense of your existence being rational, or justifiable. You feel absurd.

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Love may not lead where we think or hope, but regardless of outcome it should be a call to seriousness and truth. If it is not that - if it is not mor...more

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In life, every ending is just the start of another story.

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But life never lets you go, does it? You can't put down life the way you put down a book.

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Cut privet still smells of sour apples, as it did when I was sixteen; but this is a rare, lingering exception. At that age, everything seemed more ope...more

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Life versus Death becomes, as Montaigne pointed out, Old Age versus Death.