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

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Never had she let herself go in this way with another body, and never had another body let itself go with her in this way. Her lover could play with h...more

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He yearned to step out of his life the way one steps out of a house into the street.

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Because beyond their practical function, all gestures have a meaning that exceeds the intention of those who make them; when people in bathing suits f...more

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Every situation is of man's making and can only contain what man contains.

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The termites of reduction have always gnawed away at life: even the greatest love ends up as a skeleton of feeble memories.

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I thought of the fate of Descartes’ famous formulation: man as ‘master and proprietor of nature.’ Having brought off miracles in science and technolog...more

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...because love is continual interrogation. I don't know of a better definition of love.

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For it is clear immediately: human life as such is a defeat. All we can do in the face of that ineluctable defeat called life is to try to understand ...more

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People meet in the course of life, they talk together, they discuss, they quarrel, without realizing that they're talking to one another across a dist...more

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Do stories, apart from happening, being, have something to say? For all my skepticism, some trace of irrational superstition did survive in me, the st...more

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Most people willingly deceive themselves with a doubly false faith; they believe in eternal memory (of men, things, deeds, peoples) and in rectificati...more

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Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one l...more

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The beauty of New York rests on a completely different base. It's unintentional. It arose independent of human design, like a stalagmitic cavern. Form...more

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The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man.