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Quotes by Belgian Authors
"The idea that the world can unite without being regulated is clearly an illusion."
"In 1893 I founded a chemical company which I ran until 1899."
"Ireland is also quite nice. So is Amsterdam."
"The eruption of lived pleasure is such that in losing myself I find myself; forgetting that I exist, I realize myself."
"Peoples will be as before, the sheep sent to the slaughterhouses or to the meadows as it pleases the shepherds."
"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."
"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."
"The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear - and even, in certain respects, would be - the most modern of critical movements."
"Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom?"
"Let's face it, a nice creamy chocolate cake does a lot for a lot of people; it does for me."
"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']"
"Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see."
"Accusations are made directly to Rome about theologians from persons who are not theologians. Some of these accusations are anonymous. The local bishop should be the one to relate to theologians to determine orthodoxy."
"I saw Mussolini tirelessly contemplate a parade of thousands of young men."
"You cannot make a socialist revolution without really trying."
"Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means."
"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."
"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']"
"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']"
"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."
"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']"
"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']"
"I have always tried to write in a simple way, using down-to-earth and not abstract words."
"In this kind of situation, we tend to cling to his convictions, we believe that, by magic, we are going to recover. Then we agree to drive less good cars and we are fatally more exposed. It is what finally happened to me with Ensign."
"I was born with an enormous need for affection, and a terrible need to give it."
"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.']"
"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."
"I'm half-Irish, half-Dutch, and I was born in Belgium. If I was a dog, I'd be in a hell of a mess!"
"The word survivor suggests someone who has emerged alive from a plane crash or a natural disaster. But the word can also refer to the loved ones of murder victims, and this was the sense in which it was used at a four-day conference in early June at Boston College."
"Love can crystallize things. When love is in the air, distressing rain can become a wonderful avalanche of shimmering diamonds. Raindrops are transformed into a flood of sparkling crystal pearls. The power of love can convert rain into a multitude of glittering prisms. The mental seduction of love and a boundless illusion, inflamed by a profound uprising emotion, can change any ordinary incident into a radiant, luminous voyage. ['Crystallization under an umbrella']"
"Women emerging like aliens in a hesitant future, in a men's world with impervious codes, may feel like dots in an uncharted territory. Discovering the crucial points, which don't line up with the unbearability of reality, may be a key to the right compass in life. ['Terra incognita']"
"The world is a show and the show is a performance of the wealthy, the beautiful and the fortunate. The invulnerable, the matchless and the exclusive live a life like dazzling fish in a scintillating seascape behind glass. Everybody may admire them, but nobody can touch them. ['Keeping up with the Joneses']"
"You can have relatively high levels of class consciousness with a lower level of class militancy than one would have expected."
"There is a process of social and of political differentiation going on in the real working class all the time."
"All incidents which we experience are warily interpreted and translated in the dark chamber of our mind. They inspire us how to behave, how to think, how to act and prompt our predilections and our way of visualizing the world. The mind opens itself then to welcome the enchantments of life or to tear up destructive thinking patterns. The brain becomes truly a precious resilient partner. ['Camera obscura of the mind']"
"Some don't want to be happy, inasmuch as they undergo happiness merely as languor and yawning. They are dissatisfied with a bland and vacuous state of glee and, instead, prefer to keep on running like raging bulls through the whims and quirks of life. In reality, their dissatisfaction is their contentment. ['Happiness blowing in the wind']"
"So, then you find yourself in a situation where you have to do things because they're on offer to you, because you don't have much self-respect left. You just can't say no, even to something that you've never done before. You just can't help yourself."
"Happiness is rarely absent; it is we that know not of its presence."
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