Yes, it’s a well-known fact about you: you’re like death, you take everything.

Too much faith is the worst ally. When you believe in something literally, through your faith you’ll turn it into something absurd. One who is a genuine adherent, if you like, of some political outlook,...

E qualcos’altro lo elevava: teneva sul tavolo un libro aperto. In quel bar nessuno aveva mai aperto un libro sul tavolo. Un libro era per Tereza il segno di riconoscimento di una fratellanza segreta. Contro...

for there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred...

Estoy bajo el agua y los latidos de mi corazón producen círculos en la superficie.

Quería comprobar si la tristeza, sobre la cual el poderoso ideólogo afirmaba que es enfermiza y perjudicial, podía darme, con su con consonancia, algún alegría (porque, en mi situación, difícilmente podía buscar la alegría en...

A mismatched outfit, a slightly defective denture, an exquisite mediocrity of the soul-those are the details that make a woman real, alive. The women you see on posters or in fashion magazines-the ones all the...

So she stood naked in front of the young man and at this moment stopped playing the game.

This scene expresses the basic situation of immaturity; lyricism is an attempt to face that situation: the individual expelled from the protected enclosure of childhood wishes to enter the world, but at the same time,...

What we have not chosen we cannot consider either to our merit or our failure.

Es que hasta la alegría que produce la presencia del hombre a quien se ama se siente mejor a solas. Si la presencia fuera de el continua, sólo estaría presente en su constante transcurrir. Detenerla...

Jealousy has the amazing power to illuminate a single person in an intense beam of light, keeping the multitude of others in total darkness.

And therein lies the whole of man’s plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for...

Children, Never look Back!” and this meant that we must never allow the future to be weighed down by memory . for children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical...

Tous les hommes politiques d’aujourd’hui, selon Pontevin, sont un peu danseurs, et tous les danseurs se mêlent de politique, ce qui, toutefois, ne devrait pas nous amener à les confondre. Le danseur se distingue de...

L’homme ne peut jamais savoir ce qu’il faut vouloir car il n’a qu’une vie et il ne peut ni la comparer à des vies antérieures ni la rectifier dans des vies ultérieures. (…) Il n’existe...

He thought: that’s certainly how it starts. One day a person puts his legs up on a bench, then night comes and he falls asleep. That’s how it happens that one fine day a person...

For existential mathematics, which does not exist, would probably propose this equation: the value of coincidence equals the degree of its improbability.

Porque el joven era consciente a veces de que el mundo en que vive es un laberinto de valores cuya importancia intuye apenas vagamente y que, por lo tanto, sólo pueden dejar de ser valores...

Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case; animals have the right to a merciful death.

Youth is terrible: it is a stage trod by children in buskins and a variety of costumes mouthing speeches they’ve memorized and fanatically believe but only half understand. And history is terrible because it so...

Staring at herself for long stretches of time, she was occa­sionally upset at the sight of her mother’s features in her face. She would stare all the more doggedly at her image in an attempt...

By revealing to Tomas her dream about jabbing needles under her fingernails, Tereza unwittingly revealed that she had gone through his desk. If Tereza had been any other woman, Tomas would never have spoken to...

La única explicación que encuentro es la de que el amor no era para él una prolongación de su vida pública, sino el polo opuesto. Significaba para él el deseo de ponerse a merced de...

vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.

Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that’s beautiful.

All novels . . . are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: what is the self? How...

She knew that there were all kinds of ways to make a conquest and that one of the surest roads to a woman’s genitals was through her sadness.

But it was not only a feeling of guilt which drove him into danger. He detested the pettiness that made life semilife and men semimen. He wished to put his life on one of a...

Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events; but when it comes to how we experienced them at...

Chantal se siente a salvo, porque la voz de Jean-Marc es la voz del amor, la voz cuya existencia había olvidado en aquellos momentos de desconcierto, la voz del amor que la acaricia y la...

Jealousy is like a raging toothache. One cannot do anything when one is jealous, not even sit down. Once can only come and go. Back and forth.

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 life to live, we might as well...

The difference between the university graduate and the autodidact lies not so much in the extent of knowledge as in the extent of vitality and self-confidence

Between the approximation of the idea and the precision of reality there was a small gap of the unimaginable, and it was this hiatus that gave him no rest.

Être élu est une notion théologique qui veut dire : sans aucun mérite, par un verdict surnaturel, par une volonté libre, sinon capricieuse, de Dieu, on est choisi pour quelque chose d’exceptionnel et d’extraordinaire. C’est...

When he told F. of his disgust at the eyelid’s movement, he must have been sixteen. When he decided to study medicine, he must have been nineteen; by then, having already signed on to the...

Back at home, after some prodding from Tereza, he admitted that he had been jealous watching her dance with a colleague of his. “You mean you were really jealous?” she asked him ten times or...

It was vertigo. A heady, insuperable longing to fall. We might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. Aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it....

Yes, it was too late, and Sabina knew she would leave Paris, move on, and on again, because were she to die here they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind...

Ya hoy la historia no es más que la estrecha hebra de lo recordado sobre el océano de lo olvidado, pero el tiempo sigue su marcha y llegará la época en que los años tengan...

Tereza tried to see herself through her body. That is why, from girlhood on, she would stand before the mirror so often. And because she was afraid her mother would catch her at it, every...

Loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they too, fade away.

El amor empieza por una metafora. Dicho de otro modo; el amor empieza en el momento en que una mujer inscribe su primera palabra en nuestra memoria poética.

I am not worthy of my suffering. A great sentence. It suggests not only that suffering is the basis of the self, its sole indubitable ontological proof, but also that it is the one feeling...

You can’t measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange.

I understand you, and I shall not attempt to make you change your mind. I am too old to want to improve the world. I have told you what I think, and that is all....

As she uttered the words of the prayer, she glanced up at him as if he were God Himself. He watched her with growing pleasure. In front of him was kneeling the directress, being humiliated...

He was looking for immensity. His life was hopelessly small, everything surrounding him was nondescript and gray. And death is absolute; it is indivisible and indissoluble. The presence of the girl was pathetic (a few...

As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author...