Activity

These commonplace objects implied a conscious self-discipline. You could tell from them that whoever lived here did not need to be taught order, that the order sprang from within, that she was quite capable of teaching herself. Do you know enough about servants’ rooms to know what they are stuffed …

[...] But I kept leafing distractedly through the papers, unable to give world affairs my full attention. I asked myself what right I had in a world like this to worry so intensely about myself, to be so obsessed by what would happen to me and whether I had any right to care so much about my own li…

Lázár was smoking a cigarette, listening, watching the dancers. I hadn’t seen him for a year and now he seemed like a complete stranger … He radiated such extraordinary loneliness, he might as well have been living at the North Pole. Loneliness and calm. A sad calm. I suddenly understood that he ha…

“You will understand it eventually, but you will suffer a great deal. Passionate souls like yours are proud and suffer greatly. You say you want to possess your husband’s heart. You also say your husband is a genuine man, not a fickle womanizer but a serious, pure-hearted man with a secret. What co…

One day—I remember it perfectly, it was an April morning, the fourteenth, a Sunday—I was sitting out on the terrace, reading a book, the garden, cautiously planted for spring with yellow euphorbia, in front of me, when I felt something happen inside me. Please don’t laugh. I have no wish to play Jo…