October 7, 2017

Were you in love with her?

The question is in a way meaningless, she knows, but one must ask. Love in such
situations is rarely real. Sex is the engine, exalting and ruining people, sex and
frustration. Love is what people believe is worth the path of devastation.

Sarah Hall
Wolf Border
Tags: 21st century, English, wolves

September 10, 2017

During the first part of your life, you only become aware of happiness once you have lost
it. Then an age comes, a second one, in which you already know, at the moment when
you begin to experience true happiness, that you are, at the end of the day, going to lose
it. When I met Belle, I understood that I had just entered this second age. I also
understood that I hadn’t reached the third age, in which anticipation of the loss of
happiness prevents you from living.

Michel Houellebecq
The Possibility of an Island
Tags: 21st century, French

June 10, 2017

Your only chance of survival, if you are sincerely smitten, lies in hiding this fact from the
woman you love, of feigning a casual detachment under all circumstances. What sadness
there is in this simple observation! What an accusation against man! However, it had
never occurred to me to contest this law, nor to imagine disobeying it: love makes you
weak, and the weaker of the two is oppressed, tortured and finally killed by the other,
who in his or her turn oppresses, tortures and kills without having evil intentions, without
even getting pleasure from it, with complete indifference; that’s what men, normally, call
love.

Michel Houellebecq
The Possibility of an Island
Tags: 21st century, French

February 18, 2017

‘They look so fine, and young, and wrapped up in each other. Love is so fresh and clean
at that age. Don’t you think?’

‘Margareta! I’m surprised at you! We both know there’s no such thing as love!’

‘What do you call it?’

Tatyana snuffed our her cigarette. That sly smile. ‘Mutations of wanting.’

‘You’re not serious.’

‘I am quite serious. Look at those kids. The boys want to get the girls into bed so they can
have their corks popped off their bottles and forth. When a man blows his nose you don’t
call it love. Why get all misty-eyed when a man blows another part of his anatomy? As
for the girls, they’re either going along for the ride because they can get the things they
want from the boys, or else maybe they enjoy being in bed too. Thought I doubt it. I
never knew an eighteen-year-old boy who didn’t drop the egg off his spoon at the first
fence.’

‘But that’s list! You’re talking about lust, not love.’

‘Lust is the hard sell. Love is the soft sell. The profit margin is the same.’

‘But love’s the opposite of self-interest. True, tender, love is pure and selfless.’

‘No. True, tender love is self-interest so sinewy that it only looks selfless.’

David Mitchell
Ghostwritten
Tags: 20th century, magical