I only saw her fight back once, when her husband took a lover. Then she kicked up a fuss, lost a few pounds, smashed some glasses and - for weeks on end- kept the rest of the whole neighborhood awake with her shouting. Absurd though it may seem, I think that was the happiest time of her life. She was fighting for something; she felt alive and capable of responding to the challenges facing her.
She was neither happy nor unhappy, and that was why she couldn’t go on.
I will tell everyone that the children are my reason for living, when in reality my life is their reason for living.
A lot of people would talk about the horrors in other people’s lives as if they were genuinely trying to help them, but the truth was that they took pleasure in the suffering of others, because that made them believe they were happy and that life had been generous with them.
Insanity is the inability to communicate your ideas. It’s as of you were in a foreign country, able to see and understand everything that’s going on around you but incapable of explaining what you need to know or of being help, because you don’t understand the language they speak there.
Everything so stupid that she has ended up accepting what life had naturally imposed on her. In adolescence she thought it was too early to choose; now, in young adulthood, she was convinced it was too late to change. And she has spent all her energies on trying to ensure that her life continued exactly as it always had.
That was keeping with what she had done all her life, always looking for the easy option, for whatever was nearest at hand.
She always spent her life waiting for something: for her father to come back from work, for the letter from a lover that never arrived, for her end-of-year exams, for the train, the bus, the phone call, the holiday, the end of the holidays.
Because this is a prison and there’s a prison warder pretending to read a book, just to make others think she’s an intelligent woman. The fact is, though, that she’s watching every movement in the ward, and she guards the keys to the door as if they were a treasure. It’s doubtless all in the regulations and so she must obey, because that way she can pretend to an authority she doesn’t have in her everyday life, with her husband and children.
‘Keys?’ said the nurse. ‘The door is always open. You don’t think I’d stay locked up in here with a load of mental patients, do you?’
‘What make a person hate themselves?’
‘Cowardice perhaps. Or the eternal fear of being wrong, of not doing what other expect.’
Certain people, in their eagerness to construct a world which no external threat can penetrate, build exaggeratedly high defenses against the outside world, against new people, new places, different experiences, and leave their inner world stripped bare. In order to avoid external attack, they had also deliberately limited internal growth. They continued going to work, watching television, having children, complaining about the traffic, but these things happened automatically, unaccompanied by any particular emotion, because, after all, everything was under control. The great problem with poising by Bitterness was that hatred, love, despair, enthusiasm, curiosity – also ceased to manifest themselves. After a while, the embittered person felt no desire at all. They lacked the will either to live or die, that was the problem. The chronically embittered person only noticed his illness once a week, on Sunday afternoons. Then, with no work or routine to relieve the symptoms, he would feel that something was very wrong, since he found the peace of those endless afternoons infernal and felt only a keen sense of constant irritation.
Stop thinking all the time that you’re in the way that you’re bothering the person next to you. If people don’t like it, they can complain. And if they don’t have the courage to complain, that’s their problem.
Human being is like that we've replaced nearly all our emotions with fear.
I’ve got a lot to do, things that I always postponed for some future date, in the days when I thought life would last for ever. Things I’d lost interest in, when I started to believe that life wasn’t worth living.
I need visit Ljubljana castle. It’s always been there and I’ve never even had the curiosity to go and see it close to. I need to talk to the woman who sells chestnuts in winter and flowers in the spring. We passed each other so often, and I never once asked her how she was. And I want to go out without a jacket and walk in the snow, I want to find out what extreme cold feels like, I, who always so well wrapped up, so afraid of catching a cold. I want to feel the rain on my face, to smile at any man I feel attracted to, to accept all the coffees men might buy for me. I want to kiss my mother, tell her I love her, weep in her lap, unashamed of showing my feeling, because they were always there even though I hid them. I might go into a church and look at those images that never meant anything to me and see if they say something to me now. If an interesting man invites me out to a club, I’ll accept, and I’ll dance all night until I drop. Then I’ll go to bed with him, but not the way I used to go to bed with other men, trying to stay in control, pretending things I didn’t feel. I want to give myself to one man, to the city, to life and, finally, to death.
If I’ve still got twenty-four hours of life left, and there are so many experiences waiting for me, I decided it would be better to put aside despair.
God was there and yet people believed they still has to go on looking, because it seemed too simple to accept that life was an act of faith.
The price you pay for having to deal with those minor problems is far less than the price you pay for not recognizing they’re yours.
Everything that happens in our life is our fault and ours alone. A lot of people go through the same difficulties we went through, and they react completely differently. We looked for the easiest way out: a separate reality.
Be like the fountain that overflows, not like the cistern that merely contains.
The only known cure for Vitriol: an awareness of life.
The medication: an awareness of death.
Whilst wars did have their psychological victims, they were far fewer than, say, the victims of stress, tedium, congenital illness, loneliness and rejection. When a community had a major problem to face, for example, war, hyperinflation or plague, there was a slight increase in the number of suicides, but a marked decline in cases of depression, paranoia and psychosis. These returned to their normal levels as soon as that problem had been overcome, indicating that people only allow themselves the luxury of being mad when they are in a position to do so.
The two hardest tests on the spiritual road: the patience to wait for the right moment and the courage not to be disappointed with what you encounter.
Stay mad, but behave like normal people. Run the risk of being different, but learn to do so without attracting attention.
I need to run the risk of being alive.
除了英文版 我還把中文版看了一次
因為英文版有些細節雖不重要 但沒有完全搞懂還是想從中文版中明白過來
可是看著中文版的時候 心裡一直咒罵：翻譯得真是他媽的差！
幸好我最先看的是英文版 否則太多地方都會看不順 絕對影響理解能力
難道出版社沒有負責編輯較對的人
這樣也能出版？！魂淡！
給這本書一句概括：人一生的痛苦根源出於對自己作出非現實的捆綁
而我個人認為這問題是出於人類對自身持著薄弱的存在感及價值
我寫意 (4)