“Loyalty, Signor Molteni, not love. Penelope is loyal to Ulysses but we do not know how far she loved him...and as you know people can sometimes be absolutely loyal without loving. In certain cases, in fact, loyalty is form of vengeance, of black-mail, of recovering one's self-respect. Loyalty, not love.”
― Alberto Moravia, quote from Contempt
“An uncertain evil causes anxiety because, at the bottom of one's heart, one goes on hoping till the last moment that it may not be true; a certain evil, on the other hand, instills, for a time, a kind of dreary tranquillity.”
― Alberto Moravia, quote from Contempt
“Because the world to-day is so constructed that no one can do what he would like to do, and he is forced, instead, to do what others wish him to do. Because the question of money always intrudes—into what we do, into what we are, into what we wish to become, into our work, into our highest aspirations, even into our relations with the people we love!”
― Alberto Moravia, quote from Contempt
“They say that, if we manage to live without too great an effort, it is entirely owing to the automatism which makes us unconscious of a great part of our movements. In order to take one single step, it seems, we displace an infinite number of muscles, and yet, thanks to this automatism, we are unaware of it. The same thing happens in our relations with other people.”
― Alberto Moravia, quote from Contempt
“I felt that the metal of my spirit, like a bar of iron that is softened and bent by a persistent flame, was being gradually softened and bent by the troubles that oppressed it. In spite of myself, I was conscious of a feeling of envy for those who did not suffer from such troubles, for the wealthy and the privileged; and this envy, I observed, was accompanied—still against my will—by a feeling of bitterness towards them, which, in turn, did not limit its aim to particular persons or situations, but, as if by an uncontrollable bias, tended to assume the general, abstract character of a whole conception of life. In fact, during those difficult days, I came very gradually to feel that my irritation and my intolerance of poverty were turning into a revolt against injustice, and not only against the injustice which struck at me personally but the injustice from which so many others like me suffered. I was quite aware of this almost imperceptible transformation of my subjective resentments into objective reflections and states of mind, owing to the bent of my thoughts which led always and irresistibly in the same direction: owing also to my conversation, which, without my intending it, alway harped upon the same subject. I also noticed in myself a growing sympathy for those political parties which proclaimed their struggle against the evils and infamies of the society to which, in the end I had attributed the troubles that beset me—a society which, as I thought, in reference to myself, allowed its best sons to languish and protected its worst ones. Usually, and in the simpler, less cultivated people, this process occurs without their knowing it, in the dark depths of consciousness where, by a kind of mysterious alchemy, egoism is transmuted into altruism, hatred into love, fear into courage; but to me, accustomed as I was to observing and studying myself, the whole thing was clear and visible, as though I were watching it happen in someone else; and yet I was aware the whole time that I was being swayed by material subjective factors, that I was transforming purely personal motives into universal reasons.”
― Alberto Moravia, quote from Contempt
“De la misma forma que una barra de hierro sometida a una llamapersistente se ablanda y dobla, sentía entonces que el metal de mi ánimo era gradualmenteablandado y doblado por las angustias que lo oprimían.”
― Alberto Moravia, quote from Contempt
“... Emilia'nın her türlü kusurdan arınmış olduğunu düşünüyordum ve benim de ona öyle göründüğümü varsayıyordum. Ya da belki ben onun kusurlarını, o da benimkileri görüyordu ama aşk duygusunun ürettiği gizemli bir dönüşüm nedeniyle bu kusurlar bize sadece bağışlanabilir değil, aynı zamanda sevilebilir görünüyordu; bunlar sanki kusur değil, türünün özel bir örneği olsa bile birer nitelikti. Her neyse, biz birbirimizi yargılamıyor, seviyorduk.”
― Alberto Moravia, quote from Contempt
“لم أشك لحظة حين صاحت بي ذلك اليوم : (إنني أحتقرك !). إن هذه العبارة التي، لو قالها فم آخر ربما لم تعن شيئًا، كانت تتلبس في نظرها معنى دقيقًا محددًا: كانت تحتقرني حقًا، وليس ثمة بعد الآن مجال لفعل شيء. وحتى لو كنت أجهل كل شيء عن طبع إيملي، فإن اللهجة التي لفظت بها هذه العبارة لم تكن تترك أي شك: كانت لهجة الكلمة لدى ولادتها، منبثقة توًا من الشيء نفسه، منطوقة من قبل انسان ربما كان يستعملها للمرة الأولى، وهو قد استمدها - بدافع من الضرورة - من ارث اللغة العريق القدم، من غير أن يبحث عنها، وعلى غير إرادة منه تقريبًا.”
― Alberto Moravia, quote from Contempt
Alberto Moravia
Born place: in Via Sgambati, Rome, Italy
Born date November 28, 1907
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“[From The Jilting of Granny Weatherall]
You waste life when you waste good food.”
― Katherine Anne Porter, quote from The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter
“There isn’t any room,” said Joshua. “You travel back along the line of time and you don’t find the past, but another world, another bracket of consciousness. The earth would be the same, you see, or almost the same. Same trees, same rivers, same hills, but it wouldn’t be the world we know. Because it has lived a different life, it has developed differently. The second back of us is not the second back of us at all, but another second, a totally separate sector of time. We live in the same second all the time. We move along within the bracket of that second, that tiny bit of time that has been allotted to our particular world.” “The way we keep time was to blame,” said Ichabod. “It was the thing that kept us from thinking of it in the way it really was. For we thought all the time that we were passing through time when we really weren’t, when we never have. We’ve just been moving along with time. We said, there’s another second gone, there’s another minute and another hour and another day, when, as a matter of fact the second or the minute or the hour was never gone. It was the same one all the time. It had just moved along and we had moved with it.” Jenkins nodded. “I see. Like driftwood on the river. Chips moving with the river. And the scene changes along the river bank, but the water is the same.” “That’s roughly it,” said Joshua. “Except that time is a rigid stream and the different worlds are more firmly fixed in place than the driftwood on the river.”
― Clifford D. Simak, quote from City
“В обществото, което сме изградили, няма място за човек като мен, но природата ... ще ми предложи скални пукнатини, където да се скрия и тайни долини, в чиято тишина да плача, без да ме безпокоят. Тя ще окачи звезди на мрака, за да мога да се разхождам през нощта, без да се препъвам, и ще изпрати вятър да заличи следите ми, така че никой да не ме последва; тя ще ме измие във водите си, ще ме гости с горчиви треви и отново ще ме направи цял.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from De Profundis and Other Writings
“Whenever our friends get involved with married men we hear about what they say and it's always the same and we always tell our friends that he's never going to leave her, but the minute it happens to us, the minute we meet a married man and he says he loves his wife but he's not in love with her, we believe him.”
― Jane Green, quote from Mr. Maybe
“I can't even tell you how good it felt to see him. It felt even better when he reached through the metal grate, wrapped his fingers around the front of my shirt, dragged me forward, and kissed me through the bars.
"Sorry" he said-only not looking to sorry, if you know what I mean.”
― Meg Cabot, quote from When Lightning Strikes
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