Mario Hinksman

“our student years are the only happy ones, when the future seems open, when everything seems possible, and after that adulthood and career are only a slow and progressive process of ending up in a rut. That's probably also why the friendships of our youth, the ones we make during our time as students and which are our only true friendships, never survive into adulthood: we avoid seeing them so as not to be confronted by witnesses to our crushed hopes, the evidence of our defeat.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Serotonin

“People believe what they want to believe, and that's why it's only logical-and so easy-that everything should have its time to be believed”
― Javier Marías, Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear / Dance and Dream / Poison, Shadow, and Farewell

“I could have made a woman happy. Well, two; I have said which ones. Everything was clear, extremely clear from the beginning, but we didn't realize. Did we yield to the illusion of individual freedom, of an open life, of infinite possibilities? It's possible; those ideas were part of the spirit of the age; we didn't formalize them, we didn't have the taste to do that; we merely conformed and allowed ourselves to be destroyed by them; and then , for a very long to suffer as a result.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Serotonin

“You’ll always get the kind of person who watches himself acting, who
sees himself as if in some continuous performance. Who believes there’ll be witnesses to report his generous or
contemptible death and that this is what matters most. Or who, if there
are no witnesses, invents them — the eye of God, the world stage,
or whatever. Who believes that the world only exists to the extent that it’s reported and events only to the extent that they’re
recounted, even though it’s highly unlikely that anyone will
bother to recount them, or to recount those particular facts, I
mean, the facts relating to each individual. The vast majority
of things simply happen and there neither is nor ever was any
record of them, those we hear about are an infinitesimal fraction
of what goes on. Most lives and, needless to say, most deaths, are
forgotten as soon as they’ve occurred and leave not the slightest
trace, or become unknown soon afterwards, after a few years, a
few decades, a century, which, as you know, is, in reality, a very
short time. Take battles, for example, think how important they
were for those who took part in them and, sometimes, for their
compatriots, think how many of those battles now mean nothing to us, not even their names, we don’t even know which war
they belonged to, more than that, we don’t care. What do the
names Ulundi and Beersheba, or Gravelotte and Rezonville, or
Namur, or Maiwand, Paardeberg and Mafeking, or Mohacs, or
Nájera, mean to anyone nowadays?’ — He mispronounced that
last name, Nájera. — ‘But there are many others who resist, incapable of accepting their own insignificance or invisibility, I
mean once they’re dead and converted into past matter, once
they’re no longer present to defend their existence and to declare: “Hey, I’m here. I can intervene, I have influence, I can do
good or cause harm, save or destroy, and even change the course
of the world, because I haven’t yet disappeared.” — ‘I’m still here,
therefore I must have been here before,”
― Javier Marías, Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear / Dance and Dream / Poison, Shadow, and Farewell