Women were like rivers, their banks were unreachable, the night often rang with the cries of the drowned.
Interpretation
This quote expresses the complexity and unattainability of women's emotions and experiences.
Thomas Bernhard's quote likens women to rivers, suggesting that their depths and boundaries are often beyond reach, symbolizing the emotional and psychological complexities that they embody. The imagery of drowning cries at night underscores the pain and struggle associated with navigating these depths, highlighting how difficult it can be to truly connect with or understand them.
In practice
In a discussion about gender dynamics, this quote highlights the deep emotional landscape of women.
In theory we understand people, but in practice we can't put up with them, I thought, deal with them for the most part reluctantly and always treat them from our point of view. We should observe and treat people not from our point of view but from all angles, I thought, associate with them in such a way that we can say we associate with them so to speak in a completely unbiased way, which however isn't possible, since we actually are always biased against everybody.
Only when I am by seawater can I truly breathe, to say nothing of my ability to think.
Everyone is a virtuoso on his own instrument, but together they add up to an intolerable cacophony.
I would be the unhappiest person imaginable, confronted daily with disastrous works crying out with errors, imprecision, carelessness, amateurishness. I avoided this punishment by destroying them, I thought, and suddenly I took great pleasure in the word destroying.
We have to keep company with supposedly bad characters if we are to survive and not succumb to mental atrophy. People of good character, so called, are the ones who end up boring us to death.
Everything is what it is, that's all. If we keep attaching meanings and mysteries to everything we perceive, everything we see that is, and to everything that goes on inside us, we are bound to go crazy sooner or later, I thought.
Today at Pearl Harbor, veterans are gathering to pay tribute to the young men they remember who never escaped the sunken ships. And over the years, some Pearl Harbor veterans have made a last request. They ask that their ashes be brought down and placed inside the USS Arizona. After the long lives given them, they wanted to rest besides the best men they ever knew. Such loyalty and love remain the greatest strength of the United States Navy.
For above all things Love means sweetness, and truth, and measure; yea, loyalty to the loved one and to your word. And because of this I dare not meddle with so high a matter.
A man so painfully in love is capable of self-torture beyond belief.
If a lover is wretched who invokes kisses of which he knows not the flavor, a thousand times more wretched is he who has had a taste of the flavor and then had it denied him.
But what happens when her beauty is torn from her like a cover from a book? Will he care to read her then, although her pages speak of nothing but love for him?
And when I talk about love, I'm talking about something that's great, though, brother. I'm talking about something that will sustain you.
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