Novelists From Switzerland

"Even silence becomes whether we want it or not a statement that is in fact astoundingly presumptuous"

"We nest in an accident whose precarious balance, when we happen to become conscious of it, oppresses yet at the same time inspires us"

"How can we ever judge a human being when he is and he will always be another person"

"What we call unfaithfuless: our attempt for once to get out from behind our own face, our desperate hope of eluding the definitive."

"Not to know one another to a degree that went beyond all possibility of knowing one another was beautiful."

"Technology [is] the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it."

"I know that I'm the happiest of lovers..."

"Cause and effect are never divided between two people"

"Nothing is harder than to accept oneself."

"The horror of uncreative solitude....."

"You can't make the incomprehensible comprehensible without losing it completely."

"It is the secret that a man and a woman keep from each other that makes them a couple"

"Does not everyone who describes something he has experienced believe basically that whatever happens to him has some sort of relevance."

"The renunciation of recognition will never become possible without a certitude that our life is directed by a suprahuman authority."

"How much self-knowledge is limited to presenting other people with a more precise and exact description of our weaknesses."

"You merely had an affair with me, to be exact, and therefore no right to prevent me from another affair.'"

"It is a sign of non love that is to say a sin, to form a finished image of ones neighbors."

"My reality doesn't lie in the part I play, but in the unconscious decision as to what kind of part I assign to myself."

"Carrying on with the conversation like a woman when the bill comes..."

"They wanted what is possible only once: the now."

"He knows that every piece of selfknowledge which one cannot keep to oneself makes one smaller and smaller, he knows that he who cannot keep silent his wishes to be recognized in the greatness of his selfknowledge which is no selfknowledge if it cannot be kept silent, and one becomes hypersensitive one feels betrayed because one wants to be recognized by people, one becomes ridiculous ambitious in inverse ratio to ones selfknowledge"

"The monstruous paradox that people come closer to one another without words"

"To a certain degree we are really the person others have seen in us"

"Time does not change us it just unfolds us"

"Uniforms ruin every character"

"'Everything that is human looks like a special case'"

"The sort of misery that brings no moral reward, misery that is of no value to the mind and soul, that is the true misery, it is hopeless, bestial and nothing else."

"To write is to read one's own self"

"Half a lifetime is spent with the unspoken question: Will it happen will it not?"

"Finished things cease to be a shelter for the spirit; but work in progress is a delight"

"(Present) it is a culture that strictly ignores present obligations and places itself entirely at the service of eternity"

"Why there are so many great actresses, so few great woman writers? The erotic urge that lies at the bottom of all art has a feminine and a masculine character. Feminine is the urge to be; masculine the urge to do. Interpretative art always has more of the feminine about it"

"Your virtuous living is your enemy's best and cheapest weapon"

"What makes Shakespeare so overwhelming is the way in which the situation (who is confronting whom) is usually itself part of the composition, meaningful already as a situation"

"Plots- it seems there are thousands of them, all one's acquaintances known some, strangers make a present of them in letters, each the basis for a play or a novel..."

"That a plot has no real life of its own; it exists only in it's precipitates. It cannot be distilled but only crystallized- in which form it is then immutable, whether successful or unsuccessful: once and for all"

"I feel fairly certain that my hatred harms me more than the people whom I hate."

"What hope have you know given up ?"

"Do you know what you need?"

"...for no rational reason."

"Life is boring. I have experiences now only when I am writing."

"There are moments when her voice is all he needs."

"You can lose a woman when you have won her."

"Listen my friend! I am a sinner and you are a sinner, but someday the sinner will be Brahma again, will someday attain Nirvana, will someday become a Buddha. Now this "someday" is illusion; it is only a comparison. The sinner is not on his way to a Buddha-like state; he is not evolving, although our thinking cannot conceive things otherwise. No, the potential Buddha already exists in the sinner; his future is already there. The potential hidden Buddha must be recognized in him, in you, in everybody. The world, Govinda, is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a path to perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment; every sin already carries grace within it, all small children are potential old men, all sucklings have death within them, all dying people — eternal life. It is not possible for one person to see how far another is on the way; the Buddha exits in robber and the dice player; the robber exists in the Brahmin. During deep meditation it is possible to dispel time, to see simultaneously all the past, present, and future, and then everything is good, everything is perfect, everything is Brahman."

"Everything that is thought and expressed in words is one-sided, only half the truth; it all lacks totality, completeness, unity. When the Illustrious Buddha taught about the world, he had to divide it into Samsara and Nirvana, illusion and truth, into suffering and salvation. One cannot do otherwise, there is no other method for those who teach. But the world itself, being in and around us, is never one-sided. Never is a man or a deed wholly Samsara or wholly Nirvana; never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner. This only seems so because we suffer the illusion that time is something real."

"Certainly you shouldn't go kill somebody or rape a girl, no! But you haven't reached the point where you can understand the actual meaning of "permitted" and "forbidden." You've only sensed part of the truth. You will feel the other part, too, you can depend on it. For instance, for about a year you have had to struggle with a drive that is stronger than any other and which is considered "forbidden." The Greeks and many other peoples, on the other hand, elevated this drive, made it divine and celebrated it in great feasts. What is forbidden, in other words, is not something eternal; it can change. Anyone can sleep with a woman as soon as he's been to a pastor with her and has married her, yet other races do it differently, even nowadays. Each of us has to find out for himself what is permitted and what is forbidden — forbidden for him. It's possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard. And vice versa. Actually it's only a question of convenience. Those who are too lazy and comfortable to think for themselves and be their own judges obey the laws. Others sense their own laws within them; things are forbidden to them that every honorable man will do any day in the year and other things are allowed to them that are generally despised. Each person must stand on his own feet."

"Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish... Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it."

"What could I say to you that would be of value, except that perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking you cannot find. … When someone is seeking, it happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal. You, O worthy one, are perhaps indeed a seeker, for in striving towards your goal, you do not see many things that are under your nose."

"Only the ideas that we actually live are of any value. You knew all along that your sanctioned world was only half the world and you tried to suppress the second half the same way the priests and teachers do. You won't succeed. No one succeeds in this once he has begun to think."

"The south winds roars at night, Curlews hasten in their flight, The air is damp and warm. Desire to sleep has vanished now, Spring has arrived in the night In the wake of a storm."