5 Quotes by Gabriel Josipovici

We live in that grave, in those clothes, in the pressure between nothing and everything, we live by perpetual movement from place to place but we want oh we so much want to escape to say it all to come home at last to the right place our rightful place our rightful space. As if that was possible.

I do not know where this mania for understanding oneself has come from, he said, but it clearly exerts a powerful hold on people.

The worst way to read, he said, is with the thought that you do not have enough time. The only way to read is in the knowledge that there is an infinite amount of time stretching ahead, and that if one wishes to taste only afew sentences per day one is free to do so.

I had always imagined, Westfield said, that one could either die tragically, cut short with much still to be done, or that one could die old and full of years, as the Bible has it, after having put one’s house in order. I had never considered that there is a third alternative, in which one went on living and yet found no order in one’s life, in which everything at the end was as confused and unfinished as it had always been.

As for his friends, he no longer had any. One after another they had all dropped away, as though friendship had become a burden which he had at first made every effort to shoulder and then had gradually realised that there was no need for and let go, and it had gone.