11 quotes
Nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.
Giovanni's Room (1956)
'Maybe everything bad that happens to you makes you weaker, and so you can stand less and less.'
Giovanni's Room (1956)
I am beginning to feel like part of a travelling circus.
Giovanni's Room (1956)
'I felt so aimless — like a tennis ball, bouncing, bouncing — I began to wonder where I'd land.'
Giovanni's Room (1956)
She is smiling and her eyes are kind but now the smile is purely social
Giovanni's Room (1956)
He was silent for a long while. Then: 'You do, sometimes, remind me of the kind of man who is tempted to put himself in prison in order to avoid being hit by a car.'
Giovanni's Room (1956)
But people can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.
Giovanni's Room (1956)
'Somebody,' said Jacques, 'your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour — and in the oddest places! — for the lack of it.'
Giovanni's Room (1956)
Much has been written of love turning to hatred, of the heart growing cold with the death of love. It is a remarkable process. It is far more terrible than anything I have ever read about it, more terrible than anything I will ever be able to say.
Giovanni's Room (1956)
I shall never be able to have any more of these boyish, zestful affairs — which are, really, when one thinks about it, a kind of higher, or, anyway, more pretentious masturbation. People are too various to be treated so lightly.
Giovanni's Room (1956)
'And, at the risk of losing forever your so remarkably candid friendship, let me tell you something. Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford, and you are not that young any more.'
Giovanni's Room (1956)