P4 (after mentioning the nostalgia in leafing through a book on Hitler,)
This reconciliation with Hitler reveals the profound moral perversity of a world that rests essentially on the nonexistence of return, for in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted.
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What is taboo except breaking laws? What is sin when you are not so religious. What is moral? When everything is permitted, what is violence?
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P27 A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.
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Why did we need to leave our homes? And why do you want to leave here? How about leaving from somebody, since a place is represented by (a) person(s). “You are Hiroshima,” the last line of Hiroshima Mon Amour by Alain Resnais.
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P31 Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.
——
The actual pain, the reality, is always found in our imaginations.
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P39 It would be senseless for the author to try to convince the reader that his characters once actually lived. They were not born of a mother’s womb; they were born of a stimulating phrase or two or from a basic situation.
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P52 They (lives) are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven’s music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual’s life.
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The music is supposed to be the process, which being continuously composed like a free improvisation. Through our poor ability to understand those dynamic motifs, although, the music is mistakenly fixed and statically composed. And we look at the music as if it’s written on a music score. It may be something we call “memory.”