Book: It's hard to be human

The paradox: things you can live without - books, art, cinema, wine, and so on - are necessary to survive.

- No idea. Ask what is easier.

People are always doing what they don't like. According to my most optimistic estimates, at any given time, only zero point three percent of people are actively doing what they like, and even then they are haunted by a keen sense of guilt, and they vow to themselves immediately return to another terribly unpleasant business.

So that's how love ends? A wound on top of a wound on top of another wound?

The past and the future are just a myth. The past is nothing but a dead present, and the future still does not exist, because by the time we get to the future, it turns into the present. The present is all we have. An ever-moving, ever-changing present. It slips out of hand. He can only be caught by letting go.

Catholicism, as I found out, is a kind of Christianity for people who like gold leaf, Latin, and wine.

I was mesmerized by Isabelle's voice when she spoke about history. There was sophistication in it, and each proposal seemed like a long thin hand, serving the past carefully, as if it were made of porcelain. As if it can be taken out and shown, but at any moment it can shatter into a million pieces.

Isabelle hugged me by the waist. I didn't know what etiquette now requires. Read poems written by dead people or do a massage? I didn't do anything.

In his early thirties, he committed suicide due to financial difficulties. I felt sad when Isabelle told about this. It is sad for all people, because they are so easily cornered. People are not the only ones in the universe who are capable of killing themselves, but they are doing it with special zeal.

I realized that some people do not just love violence, but cannot live without it. Not because they want pain, but because the pain is inside them and they want to distract from it by hurting others.

The flowers were beautiful. After love, flowers are the best advertisement for planet Earth.

With tea, life seems to be getting better. This is a hot drink made from dry leaves, which is used in difficult moments to return to normal.

I have to admit that people spend a huge amount of time – almost everything – on hypothetical. I could get rich. I could be famous. I could have been hit by a bus. I could have been born with fewer moles and larger breast sizes. When I was younger, I could have spent more time learning foreign languages. It seems that people use the conditional mood more often than any other known form of life.

That's what happens when you find out that you can feel pain that you have no control over. You become vulnerable. Because with the possibility of pain begins love. And that was very bad news for me.