Sunday, January 23, 2011

The Fruits of the Earth by Andre Gide

Book I
  • "Let your waiting be not even longing, but simply a welcoming. Welcome everything that comes to you, but do not long for anything else. Long only for what you have. ... Let your longing be for love, and your possession of a lover's."
  • "Let the importance lie in your look, not in the thing you look at."
  • "Look upon the evening as the death of the day; and upon the morning as the birth of all things. Let every moment renew your vision. The wise man is he who constantly wonders afresh."
  • "While other people were publishing or working, I, on the contrary, devoted three years of travel to forgetting all that I had learned with my head. This unlearning was slow and difficult; it was more use to me than all the learning imposed by men, and was really the beginning of an education."
  • "You will never know the efforts it cost us to become interested in life; but now that life does interest us, it will be everything else - passionately."
  • "All our life long we have been tormented by the uncertainty of our paths. How can I put it? All choice, when one comes to think of it, is terrifying: liberty when there is no duty to guide it, terrifying."
  • "All your gathered knowledge of what is outside you will remain outside you to all eternity. Why do you attach so much importance to it?"
  • "A heretic among heretics, I was constantly drawn to the most opposite opinions, the most devious thoughts, the extreme divergences. Nothing interested me in a mind but what made it different from others. I went so far as to forbid myself sympathy, which seemed to me the mere recognition of a common emotion."

  • "Let me have no rest but the sleep of death. I am afraid that every desire, every energy I have not satisfied during my life may survive to torment me."
  • "I should like to give you a joy than no one else has yet given you. I do not know how to bestow it and yet the joy is mine. I should like to speak to you more intimately than anyone else has ever spoken to you."
  • "Melancholy is nothing but abated fervor."
  • "Every creature is capable of nakedness; every emotion, of plenitude."
  • "My emotions flowered in me like a divine revelation."
  • "every feeling is present, infinitely"
  • "Our acts are attached to us as its glimmer is to phosphorous. They consume us, it is true, but they make our splendor."
  • "There are strange possibilities in every man. The present should be pregnant with all futures if the past had not already projected its history into it. But, alas, a one and only past can offer us no more than a one and only future - which it casts before us like an infinite bridge over space."
  • "We can only be sure of never doing what we are incapable of understanding. To understand id to feel capable of doing. ASSUME AS MUCH HUMANITY AS POSSIBLE - let this be your motto."
  • "pale beams streaming from the moon through the mists of night"
  • "vast and tranquil skies!"
  • "The fixity of my adoration was fearful; I was absorbed in it to self-extinction."
  • "And my brain felt like those stormy skies, charged with lowering clouds, on days when to breathe is almost impossible, and all nature longs for the flash of lighting that will rip open the murky, humor-laden bladders that blot out heaven's azure."
  • "How long, O waiting, will you last? And once over, what will there be left for us to live for?"
  • "my torpor seemed to come from the very complexity of my thought and the indecision of my will. I should have liked to sleep to all eternity in the moisture of the earth, like a vegetable. Sometimes I said to myself that sensual pleasure would put an end to my trouble, and I tried to liberate my mind by exhausting my flesh."
  • "I was perpetually too tired to speak, to listen, to write. I read..."
  • "The feeling that a plenitude of life was possible, though not yet achieved, sometimes came in glimpses, then oftener, then more and more insistently, hauntigly."
  • "My whole being felt, as it were, an immense need to refresh its vigor in a bath of newness."
  • "Storm clouds had piled themselves in the lowering sky and all nature was expectant."
  • "I have always carried with me all my possessions. At every smallest moment of my life I have felt within me the whole of my wealth. It consisted, not in the addition of a great many particular items, but in my single adoration of them."
  • Understand that the only possession of any value is life. The smallest moment of life is stronger than death and it cancels it. Death is no more than permission granted to other modes of life to exist, so that everything may be ceaselessly renewed - so that no mode of life may last longer than the time needed for it to express itself."
  • "It is not enough for me to read that the sand on the seashore id soft; my bare feet must feel it. I have no use for knowledge that has not been preceded by a sensation."
  • "I have seen springtimes unfold."
  • "every moment of my life brought me its freshness as an ineffable gift, so that I lived in an almost perpetual state of passionate wonder. I became intoxicated with extreme rapidity and went about in a sort of daze."
  • "Certainly all the laughter I have seen on lips I have wanted to kiss; all the blushes on cheeks and the tears in eyes I have wanted to drink"
Book II
  • "let every emotion be capable of becoming an intoxication to you."
  • "Never long to taste the waters of the past. Never seek to find again the past in the future. Seize from each moment its unique novelty and do not prepare your joys"
  • "Why have you not understood that all happiness is a chance encounter and that every moment presents itself to you like a beggar by the roadside?"
  • "Your dream of tomorrow is a delight, but the delight of tomorrow is another"
  • "never prepare your joys"
  • "Everything comes at its own hour"
  • "The only wisdom I want to teach you is life. For thinking is heavy a burden."
  • "here is all the warmth of my soul - take it"
  • "Take from each thing nothing but what it teaches you"
  • "I should do no further attempt to do anything if I were told, if it were proved to me, that I had unlimited time to do it in."
  • "And sometimes I felt as if other people around me were moving about merely in order to give me an increased sense of my own life."
Book III
  • "O earth, so excessively old and so young, if you knew, if you only knew the bitter-sweet taste, the delicious taste of man's brief life!"
  • "Man has only a single spring in his life, and the memory of a past joy is not the herald of coming happiness."
  • "The essence of my joy that day was something like love"
  • "Shall I wait for sleep that will not come? . . ."
  • "My love dives into the waves, forever passing, forever the same."
Book IV
  • "The flight of time maddened me. The necessity of choice was always intolerable; choosing seemed to me not so much selecting as rejecting what I didn't select. I realized with horror how restricted were the passing hours and that time has only one dimension - a line, whereas I wanted it deep and wide; as my desires hurried impatiently along it"
  • "an unoccupied hearth sick of its own emptiness"
  • "Happy, thought I, the man who is attached to nothing on earth and who carries his fervor unremittingly with him through all the ceaseless mobility of life."
  • "I lived in the perpetual, delicious expectation of the future, no matter what it might be."
  • "Remembrance of the past had only just enough power over me to give the necessary unity to my life"
  • "Often in my early morning rambles I have had the delicious sensation of having a new self, a fresh delicacy of perception."
  • "My soul was was the inn standing open at the crossroads; entered whatever would. . . . at the disposal of each of my senses, attentive, a listener without a single thought of himself, a captor of every passing emotion, and so little capable of reaction that, rather than protest against anything, I preferred to think ill of nothing. Indeed, I soon noticed how little my lofe of beauty was based upon hatred of ugliness."
  • "There came a time when my joy was so great that I longed to communicate it, to teach someone else how I kept it alive."
  • "jealous possession of happiness"
  • "My soul was in a state of lyrical ecstasy"
  • "My heart, which was naturally loving - liquid, as it were - overflowed in all directions; no joy seemed to me exclusively my own. I invited nay casual passer-by the share it"
  • "My claim was not to love anyone in particular - man or woman - but friendship itself, or affection, or love."
  • "Do you think that at this precise moment you can feel to the uttermost sensation of life in all its power, completeness, and immediacy, unless you forget all that is not life? The habits of your mind hamper you; you live in the past and the future, and you perceive nothing spontaneously. We only exist in the here and now; in this momentariness the whole past perishes before any of the future is born. Moments! You must realize the power of their presence. For each moment of our lives is essentially irreplaceable; you should learn to sink yourself in it utterly."
  • "we lulled our loves asleep to the quiet rhythm of the oars."
  • "And you must not say I owe my happiness to circumstances; no doubt they were propitious, but I did not make use of them. Do not think that my happiness has been made with the help of riches; my heart, freed from all earthly ties, has always been poor, and I shall die easily. My happiness is made of fervor."
  • "Circumstances have dealt with me in a way I cannot approve."
  • "Sight - most heart-breaking of our senses . . . Our hearth breaks at sight of what we cannot touch; The mind can seize a though more easily Than the hand what our eye covets."
  • "a too dazzling day was followed by a translucent night"
  • "She was the nuisance of my days and the delight of my nights."
  • "This summer all my desires were thirsty."
  • "One desire comes to sit at my bedside every evening; Every morning I find it still there. It has watched over me all night."
  • "What did I dream of last night? When I awoke, all my desires were thirsty, As if they had crossed deserts while they slept."
  • "Between desire for rest and thirst for pleasure."
  • "I lay on the ground, drowsed with enchantment and the fumes of melancholy ... My head had too long been swimming with fatigue."
Book V
  •  "There are morning when one gets up before daybreak, in a state of torpor. O gray autumn morning! when the soul wakes up unrefreshed, so weary and after such a burning vigil that it longs to sleep again"
  • "what I want is not so much to see something new as to leave behind everything that is not indispensable"
  • "We can never strip our souls so bare as to leave enough room in them for love - love, expectation, and hope, our only real possessions."
  • "my heart has melted with tenderness for all shelterless creatures, and I have passionately loved the vagabonds of the earth"
  • "I retrace my footsteps and my emotions"
  • "How one's head swims when one has been kept awake all night thinking!"
  • "And may all I have just thought be whirled like myself into the numbing swiftness of flight!"
  • "A zone of perfumed temperatures."
  • "At my third glass of kirsch, the blood began to flow more warmly under my skull"
  • "the whole world seems to rock under the weight and power of one's mind"
  • "the sensation of my life so intense that it was positively lyrical. At those times the voluptuous pleasure my senses brought me was such that every object that touched them became, as it were, a palpable happiness."
  • "watching the exhausted sun sink to sleep int he distance of the plains"
  • "Mere being became and immense delight to me."
  • "There is a time for laughter - and the time for laughter that is past. There is time for laughter, yes - and then for the memory of laughter."
  • "What and admirable effort the grass makes to shoot out from the seed!"
  • "every fecundation is accompanied by pleasure. The fruit clothes itself with flavor; and all the urge toward life is enveloped with enjoyment."
  • ''... lulls my memories"
  • "Glooms; glowing fire; machines dimly looming in the dark; gleam of shining coppers."
  • "Drunkenness is never anything but substitute for happiness."
  • "Carriages . . . let our fancies gallop away with you!"
  • "all our unemployed possibilities, laid by, neglected, waiting - waiting for a desire to be harnessed to you - for a traveler who longs for fairer countries..."
Book VI
  • "I am full of pity for the delicate sins of men."
  • "Perpetual novelty."
  • "Waking bathed in perspiration; a beating heart, a shuddering body, a light brain; flesh available for any call - porous flesh, too deliciously open to invasion from the outside. A low sun; yellow lawns; eye that open at the close of day. O luscious wine of evening thoughts!"
  • "there are wonderful preludes to sleep; there are wonderful awakings; but there is not wonderful sleep, and I only care a dream in so far as I believe it reality. For the best sleep is not worth the moment of awaking."
  • "I was in constant fear of doors that shut, traps."
  • "exasperated desire for novelty"
  • "my first sudden sensation was so intense that no further repetition could increase it"
  • "to watch the time modifying - but slowly modifying - the same tiny bit of space"
  • "There, after the hot day had panted itself out, I watched the more peaceful night descending."
  • "I am nothing but a rendezvous of sensations"
  • "I see a generation coming up and I see a generation going down. I see a vast generation coming up, coming up to life, all armed, all armed with joy."
  • "This is the day and we believe in it."
Book VII
  • "A triumphant impression of glory."
  • "to abandon oneself to the oblivion of the waves; to enjoy the luxury of renouncement; to become a thing!"
  • "Unimagined strangeness"
  • "Sunsets where days vanish in the west"
  • "Nights in which love fades away in sleep . . ."
  • "My mind, infinitely weary, and my flesh, exhausted by love;s restlessness"
  • "the attentive silence is full - only too full - of absence"
  • "Summer! golden ooze; profusion; glory of increased light; immense overflowing of love!"
  • "Life for us had a wild and sudden flavor and I am glad that happiness here should be like an efforescence upon things dead."
Book VIII
  • "My mind, you have been transported to prodigious heights during your fabulous excursions. O my heart, I have ministered abundantly to your thirst! My flesh, I have surfeited you with love."
  • "In vain, now that I am at rest, I try to count my riches, I have none."
  • "I only live in each fresh succeeding moment."
  • "Longings. Longings; fever; past, and gone hours of youth ... A burning thirst for all you call Sin."

No comments:

Post a Comment