The Woman in the Dunes

Loneliness was an unsatisfied thirst for illusion.

One could not do without repetition in life, like the beating of the heart, but it was also true that the beating of the heart was not all there was to life.

There wasn't a single item of importance [in the newspaper]. A tower of illusion, all of it, made of illusory bricks and full of holes. If life were made up only of imporant things, it really would be a dangerous house of glass, scarcely to be handled carelessly. But everyday life was exactly like the headlines. And so everybody, knowing the meaninglessness of existence, sets the centre of his compass at his own home.

Everyone has his own philosophy that doesn't hold good for anybody else.

He wanted to believe that his own lack of movement had stopped all movement in the world, the way a hibernating frog abolishes winter.

Only the happy ones return to contentment. Those who were sad return to despair.

I rather think the world is like sand. The fundamental nature of sand is very difficult to grasp when you think of it in its stationary state. Sand not only flows, but this very flow is the sand.

What in heaven's name was the real essence of this beauty? Was it the precision of nature with its physical laws, or was it nature's mercilessness, ceaselessly resisting man's understanding?

If there were no risk of a punishment, a getaway would lose the pleasure.

If from the beginning you always believed that a ticket was only one-way, then you wouldn't have to try so vainly to cling to the sand like an oyster to a rock.

The only way to go beyond work is through work. It is not that work itself is valuable; we surmount work by work. The real value of work lies in the strength of self-denial.

Certainly sand was not suitable for life. Yet, was a stationary condition absolutely indispensable for existence? Didn't unpleasant competition arise precisely because one tried to cling to a fixed position? If one were to give up a fixed position and abandon oneself to the movement of the sands, competition would soon stop. Actually, in the deserts flowers bloomed and insects and other animals lived their lives. These creatures were able to escape competition through their great ability to adjust--for example, the man's beetle family. While he mused on the effect of the flowing sands, he was seized from time to time by hallucinations in which he himself began to move with the flow.

The fish you don't catch is always the biggest.

This crazy, blind beating of wings caused by man-made light... this irrational connection between spiders, moths and light. If a law appeared without reason, like this, what would one believe in?

His expression hardened. It was unpleasant to have feelings that he had been at pains to check aroused to no purpose

Sand, which didn't even have a form of it's own. Yet, not a single thing could stand against this shapeless, destructive power. The very fact that it had no form was doubtless the highest manifestation of its strenght, was it not?

The beauty of sand, in other words, belonged to death. it was the beauty of death that ran through the magnificence of its ruins and its great power of destruction

The barrenness of sand, as it is usually pictured, was not caused by simple dryness, but apparently was due to the ceaseless movement that made it inhospitable to all living things. What a difference compared with the dreary way human beings clung together year in year out.

And so, one bit one's nails, unable to find contentment in the simple beating of one's heart... one smoked, unable to be satisfied with the rhythm of one's brain...

The same sand currents had swallowed up and destroyed flourishing cities and great empires. They called it the "sabulation" of the Roman Empire, if he remembered rightly.

-Well, what happens with the River of Hades in the end? -Not a thing. It's an infernal punishment precisely because nothing happens.

There are all kinds of life, and sometimes the other side of the hill looks greener. What's hardest for me is not knowing what living like this will ever come to.

Defeat begins with the fear that one had lost.