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So much of dad was collected in his name. He spelt it differently when he was young, and changed it sometime in his forties, and as he lay t...

The disquiet that had been spreading could no longer be denied, the security of the nobles was undermined, no prayers or parades could wring...

We drove down into the underground garage and parked. Wandered round town, Geir wanted to go to some record shops and look for blues CDs, hi...

The trouble with Paul was that he was as profligate with his intellectual fortune as he was with his financial fortune, but his intellect, u...

I thought of how I had met this man, who really had been my friend, who had so often brought so much happiness into my existence, which, tho...

I read and I am set free. I gain objectivity. I have ceased to be my usual disparate self. And what I read, rather than being a near-invisib...

And in this dreadful state of mind I sat for hours, for days on end with my face to the wall, tormenting myself and gradually discovering th...

BARTHÉLÉMY PRUNIÈRES Barthélémy Prunières is on the Causse Méjan. He is looking for dead men. This is his passion. The fact that he is a doc...

K. always wants to reach the goal before having reached it. This demand for a premature dénouement is the principle of figuration: it engend...

Extract the meaning out of all literature, and what you will get is a denial, however incomplete, but nonetheless an endless series of indiv...

Metaphor . . . is like the image that fuses several meanings in a dream; it is the gliding logic of the soul, corresponding to the way thing...

They are acting in the past. They don’t know it. It takes a long time to realize that there is a past… It takes a long time to understand an...

I reached at once what I conceived the proper length for my intended poema length of about one hundred lines. It is, in fact, a hundred and ...

Contemporaneity, flowing and transitory, "low," present-this "life without beginning or end" was a subject of representa...

When I was a young writer, I was jealous of the writers who had their own cities. Of Jorge Luis Borges who had Buenos Aires and always wrote...

We can endure any truth, however destructive, provided it replaces everything, provided it affords as much vitality as the hope for which it...

The other, not the self, should be the center of whatever “communication” might mean. An episode from the life of William James captures the...

and then he looks down at the floor in that way he has and when Åsleik looks down in that way it’s like he isn’t looking down, it’s like he’...

I hurried to the spinet desk, I put the dippen in the violet ink, I praised the Lord almost, though my Lord you must understand I see as a k...

Symbols apart, his political views were of an extraordinary solidity and had that freedom of great character such as is made possible only b...

In those years, the intoxication of defending tradition to the furthest extreme and the opposite thrill of shaking off tradition were mixed:...

But to come back to the elections: that was supposed to be the year of the Communists. The Communist Party was by far the leading party in T...

Now, if I write about fascism for the next few pages, it’s because several of the protagonists of this book were Fascists, just as the entir...

A further surreal effect burst loose yesterday evening on Via Benaco, as I was walking along, hands clasped behind my back, pondering who I ...

Self-restraint, in fact, consists of the ability to resist, to master, to tame, to keep from giving in to vulgar or dangerous inclinations. ...

The next day it would be my turn to say confession. I saw it as a sort of test I would have to take, and I wondered if I would be fully prep...

As little children and then as boys and young men, we were full of doubts of a legalistic nature. Do we or don’t we? Are we allowed to? And ...

 Confession is a sacrament that may be even harder to understand than the eucharist—when you’re ten years old. He would ask me what sins I’d...