Sunday, September 23, 2007

They all have only this word in their mouths: to understand. How can you explain what derives from mystery? Before Yacine, I looked without seeing. I had put my eyes, covered with a tenacious film of melancoly, onto the scrap heap, in the attic of my outcasts, for such a long time that my eyes were like two pieces of fruit rotted on their branch. I don't know by what chance I found them one day at the bottom of Yacine's eyes. Immersed in his, they rubbed themselves, clean themselves of abstinence, of blind absence, the absence of all that is for me like a hole in nothingness. My eyes returned to me with sparkles of joy on a shining surface of arrogence. With unknown shivers. Finally, with a possible hope, though still without a goal. Before Yacine I could only tolerate the night. Night that erased the day's disasters. The darkroom night where I tried to develope the flim of imprecise dreams so as to escape from the shame and the guilt of having stayed alive. From out of Yacines eyes came light, without my having looked at it. Then the sky rose up, unfurled like a symphony: the dawn trembled like a resolving chord in a nacreous instant. The zenith's diamonds exploded into fireworks. The sunset's violins stretched out their sighs until desire blazed. The moon's laughter blew away the stars. Touching Yacine's skin, I came to know my own, his vigor and his seed heretofore hidden pleasure's long discharges adn short-circuits. Maybe we'd relearned to see together or one through the other, like two very sick people who have slowly come back to life through the same vision. Now I believe this was so. Since then, it hasn't mattered if the other were far away: he was always there in that state of attention itself, only drawn toward living in the liberated moment. Since then, from teh depths of my fears, I have seen the world through the light of Yacine's eyes.
-L'interdite, Malika Mokkedem

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"You'll be happy with her, but perhaps not... perhaps you won't find peace with her...."

"Well, that's how it is, brother! That kind of woman never changes, never gives in... So you don't think I'll always be in love with her?"

"Why, I didn't say that. Perhaps you'll always be in love with her, but perhaps you won't always be happy...."

-The Brothers Karamazov

You're not wicked, you're just twisted.

But at the time I did not know; I knew generally very little, and least of all what I was doing.
-Joseph Conrad

"You don't know Weston, perhaps? The Weston, you know. The great physicist. Has Einstein on toast and drinks a pint of Schrodinger's blook for breakfast."

Just the same, I would really like to be able to hypnotize everyone, beginning with myself.

I told the book bitterly: Who are you to dare to talk about something as beautiful as that?

An escalator is a good time to reconsider, to reconsider everything: Where are you from? Where are you going? Who are you? What is your real name? What are you after?

They knew how to live with nature and get along with nature. They didn't try to be all men and no animal. That's the mistake we made when Darwin showed up.
-The Martian Chronicles

"We lost our faith and went around wondering what life was for. If art was no more than a frustrated outflinging of desire, if religion was no more than self-delusion, what good was life?"
-The Martian Chronicles

"I understand what you're going through, I really do. An Indian woman in college. I understand. I'm a Marxist."
"Really? I'm a Libra."

And I blessed God that I was free to wander, free to hope, and free to love.

It's a hell of a situation, you know: what the head brands as shameful may appear pure beauty to the heart.

Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.

Yes, it was evil. If only because I stood in dark doorways. For as everyone should know, a doorway is the favorite dwelling place of evil.
-Tin Drum

"No, sir, I hardly ever stop thinking about man's humiliation unless...unless I'm deluding myself now. But I hope to God I'm not deluding myself and, believe me, I'm not trying to make myself out as better than I really am. And the reason that I think so much about man's humiliation is that I'm such a humiliated man myself."
-The Brothers K

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move, to feel the needs and hitches of our life more clearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilization and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.

"What's the hurry, Alyosha? There's plenty of time now-the hwole world has turned a corner and started on a new course."

"How should your silence be interpreted?"
"As answers. As open or closed defenses, depending."
-The Forbidden Woman

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