Lying in a hearse as big as a furniture van, she was surrounded by dead women. There were so many of them that the back door would not close and several legs dangled out. "But I'm not dead!" Tereza cried. "I can still feel!" "So can we," the corpses laughed.
While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and exchange motifs, but if they meet when they are older their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.
What is flirtation? One might say that it is behavior leading another to believe that sexual intimacy is possible, while preventing that possibility from becoming a certainty.
Tereza knew what happens during the moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul; the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice.
She fixed him with a long, careful, searching stare that was not devoid of irony's intelligent sparkle.
The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse. But let a third party enter the game - a visitor from another planet, for example, someone to whom God says, "Thou shalt have dominion over creatures of all other stars" - and all at once taking Genesis for granted becomes problematical.
She knew she was acting like the most vulgar of women, the kind that is out to cause pain and knows how.
Horror is shock, a time of utter blindness. Horror lacks every hint of beauty. All we can see is the piercing light of an unknown event awaiting us. Sadness, on the other hand, assumes we are in the know.
Of a child of an early marriage who he has not seen in years...
"It's ancient history, after all, you and your first wife. What's it to him? What's he got to do with it." Frankly, I have stage fright at the thought of meeting him. I don't know what's made me so headstrong and kept me from seeing him. Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia.
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