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The Trouble with Being Born

Book by Emile M. Cioran · 29 quotes · Pessimism, Philosophy, Ifs

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The Trouble with Being Born Quotes

“We lived in the country, I went to school, and - an important detail - I slept in my parents' room. At night it was my father's habit to read aloud to my mother. Though he was a Greek Orthodox priest, he would read anything, doubtless assuming that at my age I wouldn't understand. Usually I didn't even listen and fell asleep, unless the text was some gripping story. One night I pricked up my ears. He was reading the scene from a biography of Rasputin where the father, on his deathbed, calls his son to him and says: 'Go to Saint Petersburg and make yourself master of the city, fear nothing and no one, for God is an old hog.' Such an enormity in my father's mouth, for whom the priesthood was not a joke, impressed me as much as a conflagration or an earthquake. But I also distinctly recall - this was over fifty years ago - that my emotion was followed by a strange, dare I say a perverse pleasure.”

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“X maintains we are at the end of a "cosmic cycle" and that soon everything will fall apart. And he does not doubt this for one moment. At the same time, he is the father of a--numerous--family. With certitudes like his, what aberration has deluded him into bringing into a doomed world one child after the next? If we foresee the End, if we are sure it will be coming soon, if we even anticipate it, better to do so alone. One does not procreate on Patmos.”

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“I do not interrupt him, I let him weigh each man's merits, waiting for him to tell me off.... His incomprehension of others is astounding. Subtle and ingenuous both, he judges you as if you were an entity or a category. Time having had no hold over him, he cannot admit that I am outside of whatever he forbids, that nothing of what he favors still concerns me. Dialogue becomes pointless with someone who escapes the procession of the years. I ask those I love to be kind enough to grow old.”

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