Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from Killing Commendatore:
“From a distance, most things look beautiful.”
“Instead of a stable truth, I choose unstable possibilities.”
“In the silence of the woods it felt like I could hear the passage of time, of life passing by. One person leaves, another appears. A thought flits away and another takes its place. One image bids farewell and another one appears on the scene. As the days piled up, I wore out, too, and was remade. Nothing stayed still. And time was lost. Behind me, time became dead grains of sand, which one after another gave way and vanished. I just sat there in front of the hole, listening to the sound of time dying.”
“Look deep enough into any person and you will find something shining within.”
“As I gazed at my reflection I wondered, Where am I headed? Before that, though, the question was Where have I come to? Where is this place? No, before that even I needed to ask, Who the hell am I?”
“We all live our lives carrying secrets we cannot disclose.”
“None of us are ever finished. Everyone is always a work in progress.”
“You can have all the desire and ache inside you want, but what you really need is a concrete starting point.”
“No need to worry. Time is the remedy for your concerns. It is the key for all things that possess form. True, time does not last forever, but as long as you have it, it is remarkably efficacious. So look forward to the future, my friends.”
“A face is like reading a palm. More than the features you’re born with, a face is gradually formed over the passage of time, through all the experiences a person goes through, and no two faces are alike.”
“That sometimes in life we can’t grasp the boundary between reality and unreality. Than boundary always seems to be shifting. As if the border between countries shifts from one day to the next depending on their mood. We need to pay close attention to that movement otherwise we won’t know which side we’re on.”
“I couldn’t be sure if I had moved forward or fallen behind, or if I was just circling over the same spot.”
“what hurt me was actually me, myself. In the midst of that continuing, unsettled silence my feelings, like a heavy pendulum, a razor-sharp blade,”
“If this was a dream, then the world I’m living in itself must all be a dream.”
“When people photograph an object, they often put a pack of cigarettes next to it to give the viewer a sense of the object’s actual size, but the pack of cigarettes next to the images in my memory expanded and contracted, depending on my mood at the time. Like the objects and events in constant flux, or perhaps in opposition to them, what should have been a fixed yardstick inside the framework of my memory seemed instead to be in perpetual motion.”
“Our lives really do seem strange and mysterious when you look back on them. Filled with unbelievably bizarre coincidences and unpredictable, zigzagging developments. While they are unfolding, it’s hard to see anything weird about them, no matter how closely you pay attention to your surroundings. In the midst of the everyday, these things may strike you as simply ordinary things, a matter of course. They might not be logical, but time has to pass before you can see if something is logical.”
“It seems as if, year after year, the world becomes a more difficult place to live.”
“The silence lent a faint weight to the air. As though I were sitting alone, at the bottom of the sea.”
“No matter how vivid a memory, the power of time was stronger. I knew this instinctively.”
“There wasn't any anger involved (I think). I mean, what was I supposed to be angry with? What I was feeling was a fundamental numbness. The numbness your heart automatically activates to lessen the awful pain when you want somebody desperately and they reject you. A kind of emotional morphine.”
“I was desperately clinging to a scrap of wood that had been swept away. In pitch-black darkness, not a single star, or the moon, visible in the sky. As long as I clung to that piece of wood I wouldn’t drown, but I had no clue where I was, where I was heading.”
“Tomorrow is tomorrow. Today is all we have right now.”
“No matter how much he loved someone, he still couldn't share his life with them. He needed solitary time every day to concentrate, and he couldn't stand it when someone's presence threw off his concentration. If he lived with someone he knew he would end up detesting them. Whether it was his parents, a wife, or children. He feared that above all. He wasn't afraid of loving someone. What he feared was growing to hate someone.”
“You’re still young, so that’s why you say that. When you get to be my age, you’ll understand how I feel. How much loneliness the truth can cause sometimes.”
“Nature grants its beauty to us all, drawing no line between rich and poor.”
“Memory can give warmth to time.”
“Everything has a bright side,” he said. “The top of even the blackest, thickest cloud shines like silver.”
“I believe that it’s not necessary to believe in the soul’s existence. But turn that around and you come to the belief that there’s no need to not believe in its existence.”
“to me my face in the mirror looked like a virtual fragment of my self that had been split in two. The self there was the one I hadn’t chosen. It wasn’t even a physical reflection.”
“I am endowed with the capacity to believe. I believe in all honesty that something will appear to guide me through the darkest and narrowest tunnel, or across the most desolate plain.”
