Quotes About Duality

Sometimes even when the book is over I don't know who's good and who's bad. It's really more interesting, I think, to write about gray characters than it is to write about black and white.

I tend to write a pretty half and half split of, like, slow, morose things and then sort of more upbeat stuff.

When you're a writer you no longer see things with the freshness of the normal person. There are always two figures that work inside you.

I feel that I am a scholar who only with the left hand writes novels.

I don't know if I'm a writer who plays poker or a poker player who writes.

I have an English identity and a French identity. When I'm in France, I'm more outgoing. And the French part of me cooks, whereas the English part of me writes.

I think of myself as a serious professor who, during the weekend, writes novels.

I can't recommend technical writing as a day job for fiction writers because it's going to be hard to write all day and then come home and write fiction.

How like a spoon with a razor edge is human edge.

It seems to me the nature of the world is all one thing or all the other. Either there is nothing but coincidence or there is nothing but established fare.

Upholder, I see its dark side, too

I felt light and heavy at the same time. I wondered if the itako we visited had really talked to my dead friend, if they actually talk to anyone, or were they simply meting out consolation at two thousand yen a shot? I didn't care. We are always looking for difficult truths in easy contexts and demanding simple answers within complicated wholes.

Twin terrors: to be awake; to be asleep.

Contradiction is what keeps sanity in place.

Ich musste mich zusammennehmen! Ich wollte einfach keine Furcht mehr empfinden! Aber so fest ich mir's vornahm, immer regte sich ein zweites Ich, und dieses zweite Ich - hatte Furcht. Ich fragte mich, was es eigentlich zu fürchten gäbe. Mein tapferes Ich spottete über das feige Ich. Nie habe ich so wie an diesem Tage den Gegensatz der beiden Wesen verspürt, die in uns wohnen. Das eine will, das andere widerstrebt, und wechselnd haben sie die Oberhand.

In that case I was a somnambulist — was living, without knowing it, that double, mysterious life which makes us doubt whether there are not two beings in us — whether a strange, unknowable, and invisible being does not, during our moments of mental and physical torpor, animate the inert body, forcing it to a more willing obedience than it yields to ourselves.

Ja ta lisas nagu omaenese mõtte jätkuks: No näete nüüd, põle see elu ühti nii hea ega nii halb kui paistab.

The world could bring you poison in a jewelled cup, or surprising gifts. Sometimes you didn't know which of them it was.

She was owner and captive, both, of a bitterly divided heart.

Accept that people aren't good or bad. Good people can do bad things, and bad people can do good things.

All that sultry May evening I danced physically with Christie, but in spirit with Tina. That special duality of the Davenports, of being able to haunt in absence, was so manifestly strong that several times I only saved myself by the sheerest miracle from calling the girl in the pale primrose dress by the wrong name.

what we usually call life is death, what we usually call death is life

Replicas never have the ghosts. They're bodies without souls.

The world is nothing but a bunch of thin lines separating what we think are extremes.