Prime of Life

To abstain from politics is in itself a political attitude.

To be oneself, simply oneself, is so amazing and utterly unique an experience that it's hard to convince oneself so singular a thing happens to everybody.

In the old days the worst part of my depression used to be the astonishment it caused me, the scandalized way in which I fought against it. Nowadays, on the other hand, I accept it cheerfully enough, like an old familiar friend.

Les cas extrêmes nous attachaient, au même titre que les névroses et les psychoses : on y retrouvait exagérées, épurées, dotées d'un saisissant relief les attitudes et les passions des gens qu'on appelle normaux.

The comradeship that welded our lives together made a superfluous mockery of any other bond we might have forged for ourselves.What, for instance, was the point of living under the same roof when the whole world was our common property?Why fear to set great distances between us when we could never truly be parted?One single aim fired us, the urge to embrace all experience, and to bear witness concerning it ...That which bound us freed us and in this freedom we found ourselves bound as closely as possible

Today it strikes me that the most important aspect of these conversations was not so much what we said as what we took for granted, and what in fact was not so at all. We were wrong about almost everything. An accurate character sketch must take these errors into account, since they expressed one kind of reality - our actual situation.

Trudging alone along that black road, sometimes in the teeth of wind and rain, and watching the white distant gleam of convolvulus through the park railings, gave me an exhilarating sensation of adventure.

...which we welcomed precisely because it happened to suit our convenience.

In those days we saw every sort of object as though it were one of those tiny handkerchiefs from which a conjuror can produce silk scarfs, streamers, flags, and yards of ribbon. A cup of coffee became a kaleidoscope in which we could spend ages watching the mutable reflections of ceiling or chandelier.

There were no scruples, no feelings of respect or loyal affection that would stop us from making up our minds by the pure light of reason - and of our own desires.

I enjoyed my exhaustion, though; I liked overdoing things

Scents, patterns of light and shade, winds and hurricanes — all pulsed inwardly through my own sinews and veins: so much so, indeed, that the throb of my blood stream, the swarming growth of my cells, the whole mystery of life housed within me seemed to be echoed by the shrilling cicadas, the gusts of wind that shook the trees, and the faint crunch of the moss as I trod it underfoot.

I was too enamored of truth ever to mourn lost illusions.

In order to lead a satisfying life I had to give pride of place in it to literature. During my adolescence and early maturity my vocation, though sincere, had lacked fulfillment: I had contented myself with the statement that I wanted to be a writer. Now the problem was to find out both what I wanted to write about, and to what extent I could actually do so: action was called for. This took me some time. Long ago I had sworn to complete my great, all-revealing work at the age of twenty-two; yet when I embarked upon the first of my published novels, She Came to Stay, I was already thirty. In the family and among childhood friends the whisper went around that I was a fruit sec; my father remarked irritably that if I had something inside me, why couldn’t I hurry up and get it out?

Pero no me imaginaba que se pudiera comunicar sinceramente con alguien. En los libros la gente se hace declaraciones de amor, de odio, pone su corazón en frases; en la vida uno nunca pronuncia palabras que pesan

I knew that no harm could ever come to me from him - unless he were to die before I died. Happiness is a rarer vocation than people suppose. I hoped I might help her to stop wasting her resources on barren preoccupations such as boredom or guilt...

There’s something inside me, something as hard as an iron bar, that crushes my will and stops every flicker of enthusiasm or desire. I strip my heart bare, and have a soul as black as any pitch. The thought that mine is not an isolated case offers me no consolation.