“But no one can do a thing about feelings, they exist and there’s no way to censor them. We can reproach ourselves or some action, for a remark, but not for a feeling, quite simply because we have no control at all over it.”
Milan Kundera Identity

“Nostalgia? How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present? (Jean-Marc knew how to answer that: you can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more; if [...]

Friendship is indispensable to man for the proper function of his memory. Remembering our past, carrying it with us always, may be the necessary requirement or maintaining, as they say, the wholeness of the self. To ensure that the self doesn’t shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be [...]

“A departure can feel like a desertion, a judgement on the place and people left behind.”
V.S. Naipaul A Bend in the River

“With each job description I read I felt a tightening of what I must call a soul. I found myself growing false to myself, acting to myself, convincing myself of my rightness for whatever was being described. And this is where I suppose life ends for most people, who stiffen in the attitudes they adopt [...]

“A vault, a dome, is also a choice of a character of light.”
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“And where does the architect sit? He sits right there; he is the one who conveys the beauty of spaces, which is the very meaning of architecture. Think of a meaningful space and you invent an environment, and it can be your invention. [...]

“The way one does things is private, but what one does can belong to everybody. Your greatest worth is in the area where you can claim no ownership, and the part that you do that doesn’t belong to you is the most precious. It is the kind of thing you can offer because it is [...]

“From beauty, Wonder. Wonder has nothing to do with knowledge. It is a first response to the intuitive, the intuitive being the odyssey, or the record of the odyssey, of our making through the untold billions of years of making. I don’t believe that one thing started at one time and another started at another [...]

“Everybody is not equally talented. They are all marvelous, yes, but not equal. There is no person without talent. Talent prevails everywhere, but the question is in what way your singularity can blossom, because you cannot learn anything that is not part of yourself.
[…]
I revere learning because it is a fundamental inspiration. It isn’t just [...]

“There is a distinction between nature’s laws and our rules. We work by rules, but we employ nature’s laws to make something. The rule is made to be changed, but nature cannot change its laws. If it did, there would be no Order whatsoever. There would be what we think is chaos. The laws of [...]