On Irish women....
"Do they drink? All Irish drink. I've been to dinners with Catherine where great ladies of Ireland have pitched forward into their plates, dead drunk."
A bad shirt is like the story of a pretty girl who is single and one day finds herself pregnant. It's not the end of life, but it's serious.
Criminal fashions have often made the transition into chic.
There are really two kinds of life. There is, as Viri says, the one people believe you are living, and there is the other. It is this other which causes the trouble, this other we long to see.
"The girl standing by the sign, the sort of thin girl..." "Who is she? Do you know?" he said casually..... He seemed calm and at ease. He was doomed as a dog that chases cars.
A perfect day begins in death, in the semblance of death, in deep surrender. The body is soft, the soul has gone forth, all strength, even breath. There is no power for good or evil, the luminous surface of another world is near, enfolding....
Knowledge does not protect one. Life is contemptuous of knowledge; it forces it to sit in the anterooms, to wait outside. Passion, energy, lies: these are what life admires.
We live in the attention of others. We turn to it like flowers to the sun.
Whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing the opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the paradox.
On what attracts some men, a minor imperfection
"Something very nice is a woman with slightly crossed eyes."
"Crossed eyes?"
"Just a little."
It is morning, the surf falling forward, its white teeth hissing on the shore.
Their life was two things: it was a life, more or less - at least it was the preparation for one - and it was an illustration of life for their children.... They wanted their children, in those years, to have the impossible, but not in the sense of the unachievable but in the sense of the pure.
On sensing wrong timing
He began to be silent. The city streets were bare. They gave evidence in their stillness and desolation of the night that had passed, they confessed to it like a weary face. He began to be uneasy. It was like an anteroom that led to a place where something terrible had happened; he could smell it as beasts smell the killing house. Suddenly he became frightened. He would find the apartment empty. It was as if he had caught sight of her shoe outside a building; he could not bear to imagine more.
Humor comes largely from not caring....Detachment is what brings forth humor.
It's a paradox.
He became terrified, that moment of terror which cannot be confessed when one realizes one's own life is nothing.
She had long, dark hair which she parted in the middle and, as is sometimes the case with breath-taking women, certain faintly male characteristics.
He was aching to talk, to be able to speak to her as if nothing were at stake.
Any two people when they separate, it's like splitting a log. The pieces aren't even. One of them contains the core.
To be close to a child, for whom one spent everything, whose life was protected and nourished by one's own, to have that child beside one, at peace, was the real, the deepest, the only joy.
The curve complemented the portion of the body meant to fit against it, and he weakened as one odes at the sight of an empty garment or the underclothes, fresh and minimal, of a loved woman, tossed aside.
Initialization of love
A warmth flooded through him, a dizziness as if he had fought an enemy. With a word, a glance she embraced him; she had opened the dull sky, the light poured down. It is always an accident that saves us. It is someone we have never seen.
The blind first light of love dims. Other people materialize...
He was frightened to realize that he had already passed with Lia into the silence of dutiful meals, their attention straying to others, to people being seated, as they waited for dishes to be placed before them.
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