Classics you can finish in a day
The Sorrows of Young Werther: “I am proud of my heart alone, it is the sole source of everything, all our strength, happiness and misery. All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own.”
White Nights: “I am a dreamer. I know so little of real life that I just can’t help re-living such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experienced. I am going to dream about you the whole night, the whole week, the whole year.”
First Love: “My son,’ he wrote to me, ‘fear the love of woman; fear that bliss, that poison….”
The Metamorphosis: “I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.”
Fahrenheit 451: “We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?”
Bonjour Tristesse: “A strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sorrow. The idea of sorrow has always appealed to me but now I am almost ashamed of its complete egoism. I have known boredom, regret, and occasionally remorse, but never sorrow. Today it envelops me like a silken web, enervating and soft, and sets me apart from everybody else.”
Night: “Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed….Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.”
Breakfast at Tiffany’s: “You call yourself a free spirit, a “wild thing,” and you’re terrified somebody’s gonna stick you in a cage. Well baby, you’re already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it’s not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somali-land. It’s wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.”
The Outsider: “I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.”
Le Silence de la Mer: “Certainly, under the silences of yesteryear – like under the calm surface of the waters, the melee of beasts in the sea – I felt the underwater life swarming with hidden feelings, desires and thoughts that deny each other and who are struggling.”
