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Quotes by Belgian Authors
"Ireland is also quite nice. So is Amsterdam."
"The idea that the world can unite without being regulated is clearly an illusion."
"In a lifeworld, where we can be what we are, and not what people expect us to be, we can escape a blank and void existence, which is linked to wrecking ennui. Boredom often slips into revulsion and nausea, for not being able to find an identity and not succeeding in acquiring individuality with the quality of authenticity. ['Like a frozen image']"
"The eruption of lived pleasure is such that in losing myself I find myself; forgetting that I exist, I realize myself."
"Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom?"
"There has been hardly a single year since 1917, and in a certain sense since 1905, without a revolution somewhere in the world in which the workers participated in a rather important way."
"I was asked to act when I couldn't act. I was asked to sing 'Funny Face' when I couldn't sing, and dance with Fred Astaire when I couldn't dance - and do all kinds of things I wasn't prepared for. Then I tried like mad to cope with it."
"In 1893 I founded a chemical company which I ran until 1899."
"Global warming has melted the polar ice caps, raised the levels of the oceans and flooded the earth's great cities. Despite its evident prosperity, New Jersey is scarcely Utopia."
"Comes the tipping point in life, when we decide to a 'stop and search' and our emotional police bring us to a standstill. This allows us to scan all the little details in the spectrum of our being; scour all fuzzy or cryptic elements that are floating around in our mind and restore the fault lines in the cluttered tale of our life. ['The world was somewhere else']"
"You cannot make a socialist revolution without really trying."
"Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see."
"Peoples will be as before, the sheep sent to the slaughterhouses or to the meadows as it pleases the shepherds."
"Happiness is rarely absent; it is we that know not of its presence."
"The crucial point in life is: are we living our 'own' life or simply a life for 'other' people. Are we not playing a role on behalf of some social groups and masquerading for fear of being excluded? ['Quest for the real moment']"
"If the whole world is in a rush and people are out of step with themselves, they fail to catch that quirky aura and that special quality of life that feeds our soul-searching frame of mind and that builds a coveted haven, giving recognition and self-reliance. ['The unbearable heaviness of being']"
"There is a process of social and of political differentiation going on in the real working class all the time."
"Let's face it, a nice creamy chocolate cake does a lot for a lot of people; it does for me."
"The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear - and even, in certain respects, would be - the most modern of critical movements."
"Dwelling among shipwrecked dreams and losing oneself in wishful thinking cannot be a solution to tribulations. Identifying cracks and apprehending the defaults in one's life is essential to find a way to get out of a ghetto and to start a search for a new haven. ['The world was somewhere else']"
"When time furtively slips like sand through the fingers and our memory becomes tired and lazy, we recognize we are at war. We are at war with forgetfulness. ['The past was her best friend']"
"On the contrary, history generally confirms that the more conscious and the better you are organized in vanguard organizations, the more constructively you operate in the mass organizations of the working class."
"A promise is a gift and a gift is a symbol of a social relationship. The donor is aware that it creates a link and the recipient identifies it as a mutual bond. A gift, however, is tangible and a promise is not. Eventually, a promise can be expounded as misunderstood, or misheard or it is simply over and done. If misheard, the social bond is to be put into question. If forgotten, it can be reminded but this is embarrassing. If elapsed, it is one of those broken promises that infest countless relationships. ['Promised me a breeze of freedom']"
"I was born with an enormous need for affection, and a terrible need to give it."
"When people's parallel truth collides with their real truth, they may have a hard time in subduing all the fanciful items and characters of their invented world. ['The day the mirror was talking back']"
"He went, ever on the move, with the slow, shuffling step of wandering beggars who are nowhere at home."
"I refuse to be held responsible for bringing back a wave of pasty-faced people into the world."
"For some, life may be a playground to undermine the brainwaves of others or simply a vainglorious game with an armory of theatrics, illustrating only bleak self-deception, haughty narcissism and dim deficiency in empathy. ['Another empty room']"
"We do not believe that the Marxist program, which embodies the continuity of the experience of the actual class struggle and real revolutions of the last one hundred and fifty years, is a definitely closed book."
"International institutions ought to be, as the national ones in democratic countries, established by the peoples and for the peoples."
"I saw Mussolini tirelessly contemplate a parade of thousands of young men."
"I believe very strongly that when it comes to desire, when it comes to attraction, that things are never black and white, things are very much shades of grey."
"Since the world has existed, there has been injustice. But it is one world, the more so as it becomes smaller, more accessible. There is just no question that there is more obligation that those who have should give to those who have nothing."
"If we don't live in the same vibe, it is hard to be aware of each other. When our reading differs from our neighbors' reality, our surroundings may take a range of discordant shades and daily episodes become unrecognizable. But if we endeavor to find out, the "who is who, the "what is what and the "where is Waldo, we might demonstrate our social literacy and connectedness. ['Fish for silence.']"
"By assembling in our mind all the consequential facts we have lived through and by reviewing, appraising or sometimes idealizing the numerous key points of the past, authenticity may gradually mutate and actuality decay at last. At that point in time we are to experience a maimed factuality. ['Labyrinth of the mind']"
"Through dreams and ideas we are seduced to go back to particular places and instances of our past. In the course of the years, these singular moments and spaces of our history very often receive then another color and dimension. Our mind tries however to tame and keep in control the phantoms of times past. If not so, our memory can be subject to an irreversible mutilation. ['The mutilated memory']"
"I have always tried to write in a simple way, using down-to-earth and not abstract words."
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