Directions to Utopia

“We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”

“The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what’s that? The freedom to starve?”

“If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood?”

“Doesn’t rain make a memory more intimate?”

If, when the spring comes,

“Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes. Of a certain size and color. A certain weight. When their meaning has become lost to us they no longer have even a name. The story on the other hand can never be lost from its place in the world for it is that place.”

“Those who are more skilled in railing at vice than in instilling virtue, and who break rather than strengthen men’s dispositions, are hurtful both to themselves and others.”

“We tend to be attracted to people who look like people we used to love.”

“She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.”