...if I were asked to think up a new name for temptation, I should recommend the word 'doorknob', because what are these protuberances put on doors for if not to tempt us...

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We struck up a conversation, taking pains at first to give it an easy flow and sticking to the most frivolous topics. Did he, I asked, believe in predestination? He did. Did he believe that all men were doomed to die? Yes, he felt certain that all men would absolutely have to die, but he was less sure that all men had to be born...

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I am not trying to say that a passport photo of himself can cure a gloomy man of a gloom for which there is no ground; for true gloom is by nature groundless; such gloom, ours at least, can be traced to no identifiable cause, and with its almost riotous gratuitousness this gloom of ours attained a pitch of intensity that would yield to nothing. If there was any way of making friends with our gloom, it was through the photos, because in these serial snapshots we found an image of ourselves which, though not exactly clear, was - and that was the essential - passive and neutralized. They gave us a kind of freedom in our dealings with ourselves; we could drink beer, torture our blood sausages, make merry and play. We bent and folded the pictures, and cut them up with little scissors we carried about with us for this precise purpose. We juxtaposed old and new pictures, made ourselves one-eyed or three-eyed, put noses on our ears, made our exposed right ears into organs of speech or silence, combined chins and foreheads. And it was not only each with his own likeness that we made these montages; Klepp borrowed features from me and I from him: thus we succeeded in making new, and we hoped, happier creatures.

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Klepp, however...must have given the cigarette girl a photo unbeknownst to me, because he became engaged to the snippety little thing and married her one day, because he wanted to have his picture back

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If Jesus had been a hunchback, they could hardly have nailed him to the cross.

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...there is also such a thing as ersatz happiness, perhaps happiness exists only as an ersatz, perhaps all happiness is an ersatz for happiness.

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Hundert teppichklopfende Weiber können einen Himmel erstürmen, können jungen Schwalben die Flügelspitzen stumpf machen und brachten Oskars in die Aprilluft getrommeltes Tempelchen mit weningen Schlägen zum Einsturz.

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And so Yorick did not become a good citizen, but a Hamlet, a fool.

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We were convinced that she looked on with indifference if she noticed us at all. Today I know that everything watches, that nothing goes unseen, and that even wallpaper has a better memory than ours. It isn't God in His heaven that sees all. A kitchen chair, a coathanger, a half-filled ash tray, or the wooden replica of a woman named Niobe can perfectly well serve as an unforgetting witness to every one of our acts.

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الذاكرة زائفة, كيف تكذّب ذكرياتنا دائمًا: تغير ترتيب الأحداث, وتعطي معنىً لشيء لم يكن له معنى, وتجمّل وتبجّل? لهذا أكتفي بما فعلته, بالمظاهر المحددة, بشكل موضوعي, لا أرغب بتضليل أو باختراع أشياء من ذكراتي.

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