Quotes
List here any quote, from Quo Vadis, that inspires you, or is something that gives you a strong visual image, or maybe you just admire the author's use of words ..... poetic, lyrical, straightforward, cultural, etc ....
The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return. ~Milan Kundera
She dropped her resistance: she was captivated by images suddenly welling up from books read long ago, from films, from her own memory, and maybe from her ancestral memory: the lost son home again with his aged mother; the man returning to his beloved from whom cruel destiny had torn him away; the family homestead we all carry about within us; the rediscovered trail still marked by the forgotten footprints of childhood; Odysseus sighting his island after years of wandering; the return, the return, the great magic of the return.
ReplyDeleteOur century is the only one in which historic dates have taken such a voracious grip on every single person's life.
ReplyDeleteShe had always taken it as a given that emigrating was a misfortune. But, now she wonders, wasn't it instead an illusion of misfortune, an illusion suggested by the the way people perceive an emigre? Wasn't she interpreting her own life according to the operating instructions other people handed her? And she thought that even though it had been imposed from the outside and against her will, her emigration was perhaps without her knowing it, the best outcome for her life. The implacable forces of history that had attacked her freedom had set her free.
ReplyDeletePeople who see their lives as a shipwreck set out to hunt down the guilty parties.
ReplyDeleteYou told me love was only about bodies. Dear girl, you would run off in a minute if a man told you he was only interested in your body. And you would come to understand the dreadful sensation of loneliness.
ReplyDeleteHe scrutinizes the square below him as if he were searching for traces he left on the pavement as a young man when he used to stroll it with his schoolmates.
ReplyDeleteHe knew very well that his memory detested him, that it did nothing but slander him; therefore he tried not to believe it and to be more lenient toward his own life.
ReplyDeleteThe life we've left behind us has a bad habit of stepping out of the shadows, of bringing complaints against us, of taking us to court.
ReplyDelete"An irreparable mistake committed at the age (20 yrs) of ignorance."
ReplyDelete"That's the age people marry, have their first child, choose a profession. Eventually we come to know and understand a lot of things, but it's too late, because a whole life has already been determined at a stage when we didn't know a thing."
... after the initial lovemaking, the lovers confront a future they are suddenly required to take on. The music is still playing, and at this delicate moment, as if it hoped to rescue them, it shifts from rock to tango. They obey the invitation, they come together and give over to that indolent monotone flood of sounds; they do not think; they let themselves be carried along and carried away; they dance, slowly and at length, with absolutely no parody.
ReplyDelete... she used to be seduced by dreams of voyages to distant stars. What pleasure to escape far away into the universe, someplace where life expresses itself differently from here and needs no bodies! But despite all his amazing rockets, man will never progress very far in the universe. The brevity of his life makes the sky a dark lid against which he will forever crack his head, to fall back onto earth, where everything alive eats and can be eaten.
ReplyDelete