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.
The greatest distance in this World is not that between living and death, it is when I am just before you, and you don't know that I Love You.
Every day we are offered new means for learning and growing in love.
For we love not God first, to compel him to love again; but he loved us first, and gave his Son for us, that we might see love and love again, saith St John in his first epistle.
It's the tragedy of loving, you can't love anything more than something you miss.
A lover cannot be chosen a la smorgasbord. A lover has to be chosen from soul-craving. To choose just because something mouthwatering stands before ou will never satisfy the hunger of the soul-self. And that is what the intuition is for; it is the direct messenger of the soul.
As Lent is the time for greater love, listen to Jesus' thirst...'Repen t and believe' Jesus tells us. What are we to repent? Our indifference, our hardness of heart. What are we to believe? Jesus thirsts even now, in your heart and in the poor -- He knows your weakness. He wants only your love, wants only the chance to love you.
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