A Book of Hours

“I remember that I took leave of my apartment in twenty minutes… If one had an idea of how little is required to dismantle them, one would never waste so much time building strategic defenses against the insults of life.”

“When you left you forgot a pack of cigarettes on the bed, half empty. I carried them around for months. Every so often I smoked one. Then they were gone.”

“His features were free of any thought, and he breathed slowly, in the pure exercise of a necessity of life, free of hidden purposes or ulterior motives.”

“It named things without seeking elegance or precision, but restoring everything to the simplicity that we imagine facts have, when we haven’t had the privilege of studying them… It was a short letter.”

“…making love is an endless attempt to find a position in which to merge with the other, a position that doesn’t exist, but looking for it exists, and knowing how to look is an art.”

“She explained that one needn’t be afraid to talk, making love, because the voice we have when we make love is what is most secret in us and the words we’re capable of the only shocking, final, total nudity available to us.”

"the more proper sense of what we can do has always seemed to me to be to put between our life and what we write a magnificent distance that, produced first by the imagination, then filled in by craft and dedication, carries us to a place where worlds, nonexistent before, appear: worlds in which what is intimately ours, unmentionably ours, returns to existence, but almost unknown to us, and touched by the grace of the most delicate forms, like fossils or butterflies."

“He left, taking the first steps backward and then turning around as if a gust of wind, and not a disrespectful choice, had decided for him—a technique of which he was a peerless master.”

“Life already has everything, provided you listen to it, and books are a useless distraction from that task, which this entire family attends to with such dedication that a man engaged in reading, in these rooms, would necessarily seem a deserter.”

“But they were like that: they ignored the passing of the days, because they aimed at living only a single, perfect day, infinitely repeated: so time for them was a phenomenon with variable margins that echoed in their lives like a foreign language.”

“If memory disorder provides a compelling analogy for the glitches in capitalist realism, the model for its smooth functioning would be dreamwork.”

“What we now begin to feel, therefore … is henceforth, where everything now submits to the perpetual change of fashion and media image, that nothing can change any longer.”

“What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”

“Everything is so nicely laid to my hand. The office I find very burdensome and often unbearable, but at bottom, all the same, easy. In this easy way I earn more than I need. What for? Whom for? I shall go up in the scale of salaries. To what purpose?”

“The tremendous world I have in my head! But how can I release it and release myself without tearing myself apart? And it is a thousand times better to tear myself apart than to keep it in check or buried in me. That is what I am here for, of that I am quite clear.”

“I am in such a bad way that I think I can only get over it by not speaking to anyone for a week, or as long as may be necessary. From the fact that you won’t try to answer this postcard in any way, I shall see that you are fond of me.”

“It is late. I should like you to know that I wished you a very good night tonight.”