Quotes About Introspection

Suffering is a form of egoism. I speak only of myself. I am not talking about her, saying what she was, making an overwhelming portrait (like the one Gide made of Madeleine). (Yet: everything is true: the sweetness, the energy, the nobility, the kindness.)

I ask for nothing but to live in my suffering.

yesterday) From the terrace of the Flore, I see a woman sitting on the windowsill of the bookstore La Hune; she is holding a glass in one hand, apparently bored; the whole room behind her is filled with men, their backs to me. A cocktail party. May cocktails. A sad, depressing sensation of a seasonal and social stereotype. What comes to my mind is that maman is no longer here and life, stupid life, continues.

Everything pains me. The merest trifle rouses a sense of abandonment. I'm impatient with other people, their will to live, their universe. Attracted by a decision to withdraw from everyone [no longer bearing the world of Y].

I waver—in the dark—between the observation (but is it entirely accurate?) that I'm unhappy only by moments, by jerks and surges, sporadically, even if such spasms are close together—and the conviction that deep down, in actual fact, I am continually, all the time, unhappy since maman's death.

A cold winter night. I'm warm enough, yet I'm alone. And I realize that I'll 'have' to get used to existing quite 'naturally' within the solitude, functioning there, working there, accompanied by, 'fastened to' the presence of absence.

The grim egoism (egotism) of mourning of suffering

Socrates's daimon (the one who spoke first within him ) whispered to him: no. My daimon, on the contrary, is my stupidity: like the Nietzschean ass, I say yes to everything, in the field of my love.

Paradoxically (since people say: Work, amuse yourself, see friends) it's when we're busy, distracted, sought out, exteriorized, that we suffer most. Inwardness, calm, solitude makes us less miserable.

Una parte de mí vela en la desesperación; y simultáneamente otra se agita mentalmente arreglando mis asuntos más futiles. Resiento esto como una enfermedad.

To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not–this is the beginning of writing. — Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments . (Hill and Wang; Second Printing edition June 1, 1979) Originally published 1977.

Like a kind of melancholy mirage, the other withdraws into infinity and I wear myself out trying to get there.

Askesis is addressed to the other: turn back, look at me, see what you have made of me. It is a blackmail: I raise before the other the figure of my own disappearance, as it will surely occur, if the other does not yield.

I am caught in this contradiction: on the one hand, I believe I know the other better than anyone and triumphantly assert my knowledge to the other ( I know you—I'm the only one who really knows you!); and on the other hand, I am often struck by the obvious fact that the other is impenetrable, intractable, not to be found; I cannot open up the other, trace back the other's origins, solve the riddle. Where does the other come from? Who is the other? I wear myself out, I shall never know.

To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things that I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely *where you are not*--that is the beginning of writing.

Like the Roman fringe or the nocturnal plait, sweat is a sign. Of what? Of moral feeling. Everyone is sweating because everyone is debating something within himself.

If only we could put our minds in plaster casts like our legs! But I cannot keep from thinking from speaking; no director is there to interrupt the interior movie I keep making of myself, someone to shout *Cut!* Volubility is a specifically human misery; I am language mad; no one listens to me, no one looks at me, but...I go on talking

I take a role: *I am the one who is going to cry; and I play this role for myself *and it makes me cry* I am my own theater.

Who knows? Maybe something valuable in these notes?

12 de noviembre Hoy—día de mi cumpleaños—estoy enfermo y no puedo—no puedo ya decírselo a ella.

People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.

My greatest skill has been to want little. —HENRY DAVID THOREAU, WALDEN A

People say you have to travel to see the world. Sometimes I think that if you just stay in one place and keep your eyes open, you're going to see just about all that you can handle. —PAUL AUSTER, SMOKE

The most effectual means of being secure against pain is to retire within ourselves and to suffice for our own happiness.