“[T]o go through life and call it yours—your life—you first have to get your own pain. Pain that’s unique to you. You can’t just dip into the common bin and say ‘That’s enough!’”

But the heart has its own memory

“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”

watch your brothers die on TV, and don’t move. they are in a new world although with no exit

“What is meant when it is said that we live in democracies? Strictly speaking, democracy is not a form of State. It is always beneath and beyond these forms. Beneath, insofar as it is the necessarily egalitarian, and necessarily forgotten, foundation of the oligarchic state. Beyond, insofar as it is the public activity that counteracts the tendency of every State to monopolize and depoliticize the public sphere. Every state is oligarchic. One of the theoreticians of the opposition between democracy and totalitarianism quite happily acknowledges it: ‘It is impossible to conceive of a regime which in one sense is not oligarchic.’ But oligarchy can give democracy more or less room; it is encroached upon by democratic activity to a greater or lesser extent. In this precise sense, the constitutional forms and practices of oligarchic governments can be said to be more or less democratic. Usually the mere existence of a representative system is regarded as the crucial criteria defining democracy But this system is itself an unstable compromise, the result of opposing forces. It tends toward democracy only to the extent that it moves nearer to the power of anyone and everyone…We do not live in democracies…We live in States of oligarchic law, in other words, in states where the power of the oligarchy is limited by a dual recognition of popular sovereignty and individual liberties”