Friday, January 09, 2009

..hands up to the ceiling..






Or would his life go on like this to the end, always with new cities, a new country, new women, fresh experience, other pictures, one piled up over the other, from which at last he would have nothing, save the restless, painful beauty in his heart? Life tricked so shamelessly. It was enough to make men laugh or weep. A man could live, letting his senses have free rein, sucking his fill at the breasts of Eve, his mother - and then, though he might revel and enjoy, there was no protection against her transience, and so, like a toadstool in the woods, he shimmered today in the fairest colours, tomorrow rotted, and fell to dust.

Hermann Hesse,
Narziss and Goldmund





In Tereza’s eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood. For she had but a single weapon against the world of crudity surrounding her: the books she took out of the municipal library, and above all, the novels. She had read any number of them, from Fielding to Thomas Mann. They not only offered the possibility of an imaginary escape from a life she found unsatisfying; they also had a meaning for her as physical objects: she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.


Milan Kundera
The Unbearable Lightness of Being




On the nights she isn't with me I am deformed.
Thinking of where she might be, and all this because this girl who will tell me a thousand times how much she adores me, and mean it, this girl will never tell me once she yearns for my cock.


Elegy (2008)