Quotes from Gabriel Josipovici

I had always imagined, Westfield said, that one could either die tragically, cut short with much still to be done, or that one could die old and full of years, as the Bible has it, after having put one's house in order. I had never considered that there is a third alternative, in which one went on living and yet found no order in one's life, in which everything at the end was as confused and unfinished as it had always been.

I do not know where this mania for understanding oneself has come from, he said, but it clearly exerts a powerful hold on people.

We live in that grave, in those clothes, in the pressure between nothing and everything, we live by perpetual movement from place to place but we want oh we so much want to escape to say it all to come home at last to the right place our rightful place our rightful space. As if that was possible.

As for his friends, he no longer had any. One after another they had all dropped away, as though friendship had become a burden which he had at first made every effort to shoulder and then had gradually realised that there was no need for and let go, and it had gone.

We are in the interstices. In the intervals. We are that which moves between the spaces. Which conjures up the spaces.

The worst way to read, he said, is with the thought that you do not have enough time. The only way to read is in the knowledge that there is an infinite amount of time stretching ahead, and that if one wishes to taste only afew sentences per day one is free to do so.

Perhaps we only imagine we deserve rhythms, once lived by rhythms, when all there ever was was moments. Separate. Distinct. Like beads on a string. Except that there is no string. Or the string has broken and the beads run about all over the floor.

But there is, of course, no excuse. For it is not really his art but his life that he is talking about, and for one's life not living up to expectation there is no excuse, except for the paltry one that this is true of everybody's life.