" Real life is so all-absorbing that it doesn’t leave us time to create an imaginary, parallel life.
It’s very hard not to stay in love with or be captivated by someone who makes us laugh and does so even though he often mistreats us; the hardest thing to give up is that companionable laughter, once you’ve met someone and decided to stay with them.
How cast down we are by rejection, and how much power accrues to the person to whom we gave that power, for no one can take power unless it is first given or conferred, unless you’re prepared to adore and fear that person, unless you aspire to being loved by him or to enjoy his unswerving approval, any such ambition is a sign of conceit and that conceit is what weakens and leaves us defenseless: once that ambition remains unsatisfied or unfulfilled, it marks the beginning of our downfall.
Sensations are unstable things, they become transformed in memory, they shift and dance, they can prevail over what was said and heard, over rejection or acceptance. Sometimes, sensations can make us give up and, at others, encourage us to try again.
That Spanish mania for mixing business deals with a semblance of incipient friendship.
In Spain, oddly enough, it’s considered far more prestigious to be known by one’s first name, and this applies to only four or five or six people: “Federico” is always García Lorca, just as “Rubén” is Rubén Darío, “Juan Ramón” is the Nobel Laureate Jiménez, “Ramón” is Gómez de la Serna, “Mossèn Cinto” is Verdaguer and, five centuries on, “Garcilaso” is Garcilaso de la Vega.
In the face of ignorance, one is always free to invent.
“Far too civilized. Airport hub. Business deals by the shedload. No, I don’t like it, I don’t like it all. Tons of visitors. The annual Buchmesse. Money calling to money.
Rumor on the other hand is what lasts, it’s unstoppable, undying, the one thing that endures. I certainly don’t want to give that imbecile the gift of a rumor.
He probably often had such attacks of oral literature.
Whoever he was with and whatever the circumstances, he found it hard not to slip into pedantic, didactic mode.
Like many unhappy, lonely people, he kept a diary.
Curiosity makes us lose all caution.
Unhappy people often insist on trying to uncover the full magnitude of their unhappiness, or choose to investigate other people’s lives as a distraction from their own.
The eyes of the imagination, which are the eyes that best remember a scene and best recall it later.
In the middle of the night everything seems plausible and real.
Desire is a selfish thing too and will do almost anything to achieve satisfaction—lie, flatter, take risks, inveigle, make false promises.
A nostalgia for the life you discarded always lingers on in the inner depths of your being, and, during bad times, you seek refuge in it as you might in a daydream or a fantasy.
I sometimes think that the bonds of deceit and unhappiness are the strongest of all, as are those of error; they may bind even more closely than those of openness, contentment and sincerity.
We do sometimes bring about what we most fear because the only way of freeing ourselves from that fear is for the bad thing actually to have happened, for it to be in the past and not in the future or in the realm of possibilities. For it to remain behind. "
― Javier Marías , Así empieza lo malo
