Journey by Moonlight

In London November isn't a month, it's a state of mind.

And while there is life there is always the chance that something might happen...

Everyone has to find his own way to die.

We carry within ourselves the direction our lives will take. Within ourselves burn the timeless, fateful stars.

You start off as Mr X, who happens to be an engineer, and sooner or later you're just an engineer who happens to be called Mr X.

For love, there has to be a distance across which lovers can approach one another. The approach is of course just an illusion, because love in fact separates people. Love is a polarity.

Because, my dear, in the spiritual life opposites meet. It's not the cold passionless ones who become great ascetics, but the most hot-blooded, people with something worth renouncing. That's why the church won't allow eunuchs to become priests.

I really dislike the sort of people who aren't like other people. It's true other people are so boring. But so are the ones who aren't like them.

The staying awake was a great self-sacrificaing gesture of friendship, and wonderfully in keeping with our current mood of intense friendship and religious fervour. We were all in a state of shock. We engaged in a long Dostojevskyan conversations and drank one black coffee after another. It was sort of night typical of youth, the sort you only can look back on with shame and embarassment once you've grown up. But God knows, I must have grown up already by then, because I don't feel the slightest embarassment when I think back to it, just a terrible nostalgia.

Love preserves one moment for ever, the moment of its birth. The beloved never ages.

I really detest those people who like to draw practical conclusions from scholarly truths, who 'apply learning to real life', like engineers who turn to propositions of chemistry into insecticides for bedbugs. It translates, in Goethe's words, as: 'life is grey, but the golden tree of theory is always green'.

The matter could in fact have been resolved quite simply if all those round the table had been equally intelligent. But in this life that is rarely given.

And he knew he would not be travelling home. If he had to wear a donkey jacket and wait for fifty years, then he would wait. At last there was a place in the world where he had reason to be, a place that had meaning. For days, without realising it, he had sensed this meaning everywhere, in the streets, houses, ruins and temples of Rome. It could not be said of the feeling that it was 'filled with pleasurable expectation'. Rome and its millennia were not by nature associated with happiness, and what Mihály anticipated from the future was not what is usually conjured up by 'pleasurable expectation'. He was awaiting his fate, the logical, appropriately Roman, ending.

The nature of civilisation everywhere was such that, even with the Greeks, it diverted people’s minds away from the reality of death.

as long as we keep moving, we don’t notice how tired we are, but only when we sit down.