Quotes from K?b? Abe

Lo que tú necesitas no soy yo: seguro que es un espejo. Pues cualquier otro que no seas tú no pasa de ser, para ti, más que un espejo en donde reflejarte. Yo, desde luego, no tengo el propósito de volver a un desierto de espejos como ese

When I took the mask off, the adhesive material, musty with sweat, gave off an odor like overheated grapes. At that very moment an unbearable fatigue flowed over me, eddying in my joints like syrupy tar. But everything depends on how you think of it.

I only asked the mask to help me recover … I never once asked it to do things its own way.…

The future is merely a function of the past. There could be no plan of action tomorrow for a mask that had been alive not yet twenty-four hours. The human social equation, in short, is, like a child, too unrestricted.

More than iron doors, more than walls, it is the tiny peephole that really makes the prisoner feel locked in

Injuries to the body, especially the face, are not treated simply as problems of form. We should rather speak of themas belonging in the province of mental hygiene. Otherwise, who whould willingly devote his efforts to cosmetic work?

Yet he could not understand why he was so terribly attracted by her thighs, but he was, so much that he felt like taking the nerves of his body and coiling them one by one around them. The appetite of meat eating animals must be just this, coarse, voracious.

gelozia patetic? a oamenilor ÅŸi ner?bdarea lor în faÅ£a fericirii altora.

Suddenly, I ripped the book in two. And with it my heart. From the tear my insides came running out like a rotten egg. I became an empty, cast-off skin.

It was K's idea that faces were a roadway between men.

But I was tempted to let rumors fly, like keyhole whisperings.

It is manifestly pregnant and has a bulging white belly heavy with its load of kittens.

When I looked at you from a distance you would smile invitingly, but when I approached, the smile would change into mist and obstruct my view. ... It may be that someone else's tenderness can be experienced only as pain.

I reflected how absurd it was for me to be buried in my coat collar despite the stifling heat, unable to make the slightest physical movement, like an insect playing dead.

Was being seen the cost of the right to see? No, the worst of it was that my fate was too personal, too special. Unlike hunger, unrequited love, unemployment, sickness, bankruptcy, natural calamity, criminal exposure, my suffering was nothing I endured in common with other men. My misfortune was forever mine alone. Anyone at all could disregard me completely without feeling the slightest twinge of conscience. And I was not even permitted to protest that disregard.

A strange thing the face. I never felt anything about it at any given time, but when i found i didn't have one, I felt as if half the world had been torn away from me

Just as trees bear their fruit before winter, just as bamboo grass produces its seeds just before it withers, sex is simply a struggle with death on the human level.

In the final analysis, jealousy itself is something like a pet cat that insists on its rights but does not accept its duties.

Our silence was not the vacuum that comes from having said all there is to say. Whatever conversation we had fell naturally to pieces and crumbled in bitter silence.

It's a real handicap to have a face with shifty eyes.

I can hardly believe that the face is so important to a man's existence. A man's worth should be gauged by the content of his work; possibly the convolutions of the surface of the brain have something to do with it, but his face certainly does not. If the loss of a face can cause conspicuous change in the scale of evaluation, it may well be owing to a fundamental emptiness of content.

The moment a man and a woman decide to get married, both of them should put aside such doubts and concerns. If they can't agree, it is best not to opt for trouble from the very beginning.

There are apparently two hypotheses about jealousy: that it is a product of civilization and that it is a basic instinct of animals.

Who could imagine that one could be so ridiculed, so humiliated by oneself?