by Angie

As I mentioned before, I wanted to finish this book soon and it was wonderful. Here are some favorite quotes.

(1)
The happier people can be, the unhappier they are.

(2)
One evening, she walked past the statue of Preseren, the great Slovene poet, and she began to think about his life. When he was thirty-four, he went into a church and saw an adolescent girl, Julia Primic, with whom he fell passionately in love.

[…]

It turned out that Julia was the daughter of an upper middle-class family, and, apart from that chance sighting inside the church Preseren never again managed to get near her. But that encounter inspired his finest poetry and created a whole legend around his name. In the small central square of Ljubljana, the statue of the poet stares fixedly at something. If you follow his gaze, you will see, on the other side of the square, the face of a woman carved into the stone of one of the houses. That was where Julia had lived. Even after death Preseren gazes for all eternity on his Impossible Love.

And what if he had fought a little harder?

(3)
Although she had always felt loved and protected, there had been one missing element that would have transformed that love into a blessing: She should have allowed herself to be a little crazier.

Her parents would still have loved her, but, afraid of hurting them, she had not dared to pay the price of her dream. That dream was now buried in the depths of her memory, although sometimes it was awoken by a concert or by a beautiful record she happened to hear. Whenever that happened, though, the feeling of frustration was so intense that she immediately sent it back to sleep again.

[…]

“I should have been crazier.” But, as it undoubtedly happens with most people, she had found this out too late.

(4)
“I’ll just say that insanity is the inability to communicate your ideas. It’s as if you were in a foreign country, able to see and understand everything that’s going on around you but incapable of explaining what you need to know or of being helped, because you don’t understand the language they speak there.”

“We’ve all felt that.”

“And all of us, one way or another, are insane.”

(5)
“So let’s turn to your illness: Each human being is unique, each with their own qualities, instincts, forms of pleasure, and desire for adventure. However, society always imposes on us a collective way of behaving, and people never stop to wonder why they should behave like that. They just accept it, the way typists accepted the fact that the QWERTY keyboard was the best possible one. Have you ever met anyone in your entire life who asked why the hands of a clock should go in one particular direction and not in the other?”

(6)
The great craziness of men and women is precisely that: love.