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Quote by François Mauriac

“Her dreams took up a sharper precision of outline. She sought deliberately in her past for facts long since forgotten, for lips that from afar she had adored, for bodies vaguely recognized which chance meetings and the random happenings of dream had brought into innocent contact with her own. She composed a symphony of happiness, invented a world of delights, built up from odds and ends a wholly impossible universe of love.”

Quote by François Mauriac

Book:Thérèse Desqueyroux
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Thérèse Desqueyroux

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François Mauriac

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“Everything was predictable. Cinema had act structures. Music had beats. Poets had tricks. Books had arcs. Food tasted delicious as long as it was on the surface of one’s tongue. Any chance of happiness was but one single carousel round, so naturally, after a while, the passenger felt expired. To Andrei, there ceased to be anything worth chasing and this feeling of “running out” in an abundant globe confused him. He wished there was something in the world that was infinite or lasted forever—or was at least worth remembering forever. This was why the sleeper could not dream—his imagination writhed in his true-to-life gluttony.”

LifeArtDreamsSocietyBoredomAdulthoodMonotonyBeing BoredA Happy Ghost
Book:A Happy Ghost
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“I’ve gotten it wrong," he said. He always tried to grasp life by zooming out. That was his generation. They were fast with science and believed in the cosmos, and conceptualized reality in academic comfort which made them superior to it. They argued life had no meaning and said things like, “We’re just smart animals on an uncaring rock.” But at some point, a person trying to organize their life with reason would be stuck in infinity. There was nothing to reason with. And so they had to return— return to the monotony that meant something a second time. “My mom,” he dreamed, “once cried to me when she saw a bird chirping on her fence... real, bucket tears. She used to tell me her dreams which always meant something... A grown woman who used to pick up sticks she found pretty and keep them in her bag...She was always sweating...” There was a dumbness to her he could never understand. Andrei’s mother, so pathetically an earthling, lived in touch with humanity, and was involved in it so deeply that no intelligent, zoomed- out mind could ever comprehend. “I don’t want concepts. There is nowhere else to go in life except toward each other.”

LifeHumanityHuman BeingsGrowing UpDreamsCivilizationEmotionsBoredomMothersSensitivity
Book:A Happy Ghost
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“The rocks are craggy/unmanageable without sufficiently lacerating my Self ~ scarcely solid ground, but more accurately a foothold. Yet in smoothness, the rocks are even less effective against the sweep of the tides than the sands of the shore. I sit here, not terribly concerned about the bruises and scrapes the jagged rocks lend in the moment, but concerned nevertheless by the waves that sweep back so effortlessly over the catchstones and eternally beyond reach—evading capture, leaving only a dissipating froth upon the black ridges to signal, at the very least, that 'it' happened: for whatever 'it' is worth. There is a distinctive tenor to this declaration of presence, this collapsing flow—Something that reminds me of...?—the reverberations of which remain beyond the span of cognition. Reverberations: there exists a memory of a memory of a dream I had once, but never an authentic rendering of the essential Moment. Still I can hear it in dreams of memories of memories of dreams. In dreams: a faint voice. A persona, a belief system distinctly its own, yet for now, the roar of the tides are a whisper ears strain to grasp. Seemingly a clue to a memory locked within. Or it’s all imagination: perhaps the sound of the ocean causes me to assume I’m remembering something. Gives the memory a sentience of its own and a vessel allowing it to surge in and ebb out. Yes, I’ve heard such things mentioned before: the stimulus that reverse engineers the very memory it is presumed to trigger. Still, it bothers me: this evasive, timeless notion.”

ImaginationDreamsAuthenticityOntologySimulationIllusion Of Memory
Book:trenches parallax leapfrog
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