Quotes
List here any quote, from Meša Selimović's book Death and the Dervish. Quotes that inspire you, or give you a strong visual image, or maybe you just admire the author's use of words ..... poetic, lyrical, straightforward, cultural, etc ...
"A thousand times you regret for what you said, rarely for what you didn't say" - Meša Selimović These notes on Death and the Dervish are in celebration of Meša Selimović's birthday: April 26, 1910 Dervish (2001) + ENG subtitles
Sinful thoughts are like the wind - who can hold them back? And I do not think this is a great evil. What is the purpose of piety if there are no temptations to resist? Man is not God, his strength is the ability to restrain his own nature, so I thought, and if he has nothing to restrain, then what are his merits?
ReplyDeleteSurprisingly, that neglect, as if I were a tree, a bush, or a child, wounded my vanity; it somehow depersonalized and belittled me, deprived me of value not only in his, but in my own eyes as well.
ReplyDelete... to wait out the dawn without sleeping.... It was not far off, the first birds were announcing it with ever louder song as the sky above the dark hills raised its eyelid., showing its blue iris. The trees in the garden were still sleepy, covered with the hazy, thin darkness. Soon, at the first rays of the sun, fish would begin breaking the water's surface. I loved that morning hour of awakening, it was as if life itself were just beginning.
ReplyDeleteA personal tone is poetry, an opportunity for distortion, or arbitrariness, and to leave the realm of general thought is to doubt it.
ReplyDelete... rebellion is contagious; it can incite dissatisfactions that are always present. It resembles heroism, and maybe it is heroism, because it is resistance and dissent. It seems beautiful because it is borne by fanatics who die for beautiful words, who risk everything since they have nothing. Therefore it is attractive, just as anything that is dangerous can sometimes appear attractive and beautiful.
ReplyDeleteIt is hopeless to try to stay pure and free; someone close to you will always make your life miserable.
ReplyDeleteIt would be nice to be a vagabond. He can always search out good people and pleasant places, and he carries a cheerful soul that is open to the wide sky and free roads that lead nowhere and everywhere. If only men were not rooted in their small domains.
ReplyDelete... everyone who begs is in a terrible position: he is necessarily small and insignificant, squirming beneath someone's' foot, guilty, humiliated; threatened by the whims of others and vulnerable to their power, he wishes for some inadvertent good will; nothing depends on him, not even an expression of fear or hatred that might ruin him.
ReplyDeleteBut the picture that he developed was interesting. Taken from one of the many books that he had read (God only knows which one), and enlivened by his imagination, it glittered with the fire of his lonesome fevers, when in delirious visions he saw the beginning and end of the world.
ReplyDeleteIn the morning I went out into the fields and climbed a hill that was inn full bloom. I stood beside a low fruit tree, with my face next to its cluster of flowers, calyxes, leaves, petals - a thousand living wonders ready for insemination. I felt the intoxicating sweetness of that growth, the rush of juices through innumerable, invisible veins, and like the night before I wished that my arms would grow into branches, that the colorless blood of trees would flow into me, that I would bloom and wilt painlessly. And it was just this repetition of my strange desire that convinced me of the weight of my burden.
ReplyDeleteThe stallion, with its shiny, black coat, stout croup, sinewy legs and slender joints, stood in the middle of the yard, furious, it's pink nostrils flaring, it's eyes rolling, it's firm skin twitching, rippling in minute waves.
ReplyDeleteOrder is finality, a firm law, a reduction of the possible ways of life, the false conviction that we can keep life under control. But life keeps slipping away, and the more we try to keep hold of it, the more it eludes us.
ReplyDeleteWhen you see a young man reaching for the sky, grab him by the leg and pull him back down to the ground.
ReplyDeleteIt is better that God ask you: why did you not do that? rather than why did you do that?
ReplyDeleteI was alone again.
ReplyDeleteMaybe that was best,then you expect no help and fear no betrayal. Alone, I would do everything I could, without relying on support that was not there; then everything I achieved would be mine, both the good and the bad.
... human thought is an unsteady wave that is stirred and calmed by the capricious winds of fear and desire.
ReplyDeleteWe should kill our pasts with each passing day. Blot them out, so that they won't hurt. Each present day could thus be endured more easily, it would not be measured against what no longer exists. As things are, specters mix with our lives so that there is neither pure memory nor pure life. they clash and try to strangle each other, continually.
ReplyDeleteWe usually beautify our thoughts and hide the vipers slither within us.
ReplyDeleteHafiz-Muhammad returned from somewhere, greeted me and went off to his room. A good man, I thought , still absorbed with the happiness of my shallow harmony and simplified thinking, it seems that life is unjust to him, but that's just a prejudice; life is life, one is just like another, everyone seeks happiness, but troubles come on their own. His happiness is books, just as for others it is love.. His trouble was sickness, just as for others it is poverty, or banishment. We all walk from one bank to another, on the thin ropes of our lives, and each of our ends is known; they are all the same.
ReplyDeleteMy father is strange, he said, if that needs to be said at all, since everyone is strange except colorless and faceless people, who again are strange since they have nothing of their own. In other words, their character is precisely their lack of character. Except every one of us, of course, because we grow so accustomed to ourselves that everything that's different from us seems strange, so it could be said that whatever is not us is strange. So my father is strange because he thinks that I'm strange, and the other way around, and so on and so forth. There's no end to our strangeness, and maybe we should consider that in itself strange.
ReplyDeleteHope is the pimp of death, a murderer more dangerous than hatred. It's deceptive; it knows how to win you over, to calm you and lull you to sleep, whispering whatever you want to hear, leading you to the blade.
ReplyDeleteHis crippled sentences staggered around me for a long time, cramped, mutilated; it seemed that they could hardly stay together, while lost, decapitated fragments miraculously clung to each other and even expressed human desires
ReplyDeleteI appreciate new friendships, they give us a love that we could never do without, but old friendships are more than love, because they are parts of our very selves.
ReplyDelete... no one should be allowed to stop in one place any longer than necessary. A man isn't a tree, and being settled in one place is his misfortune. It saps his courage, breaks his confidence. When a man settles some down somewhere, he agrees to any and all of its conditions, even the disagreeable ones, and frightens himself with the uncertainty that awaits him. Change to him seems like abandonment, like a loss of an investment: someone else will occupy his domain, and he'll have to begin again. Digging oneself in marks the real beginning of old age, because a man is young as long as he isn't afraid to make new beginnings. If he stays in the same place he has to put up with this, or take action. If he moves on, he keeps his freedom; he's ready to change places and the conditions imposed on him. How can he leave, and for where? Don't smile, I know we don't have anywhere to go. But we can leave sometimes, creating the illusion of freedom. We pretend to leave, and pretend to change. But we come back again, calmed, consoled by the deception.
ReplyDeleteLove is probably the only thing in the world that does not need to be explained and whose reasons need not be discovered.
ReplyDeleteShe spoke softly, hoarsely, but each word came from her dry lips like a kiss, caressed, coddled, scented with love, wrapped in the fine cotton of her long memory.
ReplyDelete"At my age better and worse stand side by side and alternate, like day and night. Even a candle is brighter when it's burning out."
ReplyDeleteThe waves of history crash against us, like a reef. We're fed up with those in power and we've made a virtue out of distress: we've become noble-minded out of spite. You're ruthless on a whim. So who's backward?
ReplyDeleteI wanted to ask the old man, and I would have to at some point, how far would he go for his son, and what he would betray. And what would his love turn into if his son should ever perish? That would be the deepest hatred I know of.
ReplyDeleteThis love was the only thing that existed in his life, it and nothing else. Even on his deathbed, waiting to breathe his last, he still cherished it. And maybe it also sustained him, kept him alive. Maybe that was the deep and complex cunning of old age, the fear of death turned into love, so that the last buds would flower in his aged heart. A son's heart is like a bush of flowers that you do not have to dung so it will flourish; a father's love is just one of those many flowers. Maybe it is even an obstacle, a brother imposed by duty. But it is an old man's only anchor.
I say: maybe, because I do not know.
Every man thinks he can outwit everyone else, because he's sure he's the only one who's not stupid. But thinking like that is truly stupid. And so, we're all stupid.
ReplyDeleteOur enthusiasm, he said, is just as dangerous as our lack of common sense.
ReplyDelete