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On Life, Love And Women

Whenever I see you sincere I have the feeling that, in everybody's war against everybody, you left your coat of mail at home.  There is one thing a man does without any feeling of responsibility: that which he should make with the feeling of utmost responsibility:

Poem

And if the flesh is discontent(in fact, crushed, torn to pieces) – the Spirit laststhe green alcoholof the fruit I used to be…Read my bookand get intoxicatedwith the fragrance of my flesh. by Nina Cassian (b. 1924)

Eternal Womanhood

Even if human society has always been haunted by an almost imperceptible misogynic fluid, the selfsame society has enabled the advent of remarkable women in every walk of life, from politics to business to culture or science, from Sappho to Marie Curie, from Clara Schumann

Self And Portrait

Like diaries and memoirs, portraits and especially self-portraits represent a favorite means of inserting the creator's self into history. One may eventually infer, if not directly grasp a writer's or a painter's positions and opinions about his milieu and

Fiction Of The Diary

excerpts The Diary and Its Readers We should not overdo it with diaries and letters. We usually tend to deem them more revealing of the man than his public work. All that is secretive, familiar draws us as if it were a confession. It is the pleasure of breaking an interdiction,

At Home We Speak In Whispers

* Excerpts from an interview with prose writer, political analyst and journalist Stelian TĂNASE (Observator cultural no. 121, 18-24 June 2002) Why did you choose to publish At Home We Speak in Whispers at this particular moment? Books come and go in a writer's imagination.

Who Keeps A Diary And Why

1. The Mirror of the SelfThere are people, quite a few, and not particularly the happy ones, who are themselves their main concern. They pay a great deal of attention to all the signals their body sends. For them, the physical well-being is a goal in itself, which should

Quotes

He was therefore locked up between 1959 and 1964. Enough for this period of (political) imprisonment to transform him completely; to make an authentic 'homo religiosus' out of an absolute intellectual, rather agnostic and preoccupied with foreign literatures, and

The Diary Of Happiness

6 March 1960So I am finally taken out as well, led inside an office hid in that tiny niche of the arched corridor; examined, identified, undressed. I am only left one towel, one bar of soap, one toothbrush, one toothpaste, two pairs of socks, one shirt, one pair of underwear,

The Impossible Escape

Preface In April 1990, I handed over the volume The Silent Escape to the Secretariat of the French publishing house La Découverte in Paris. On September the 1st, the same year, the book was in the bookshops. It's my first book and I don't consider it literature.

Eliade's American Experience

It is well known that Mircea Eliade lived numerous experiences of otherness and exile in countries such as India, France, Portugal, America, but it is only in the last that he remained for twenty-seven years. Eliade's perspective on America is somehow indebted to the

Memoirs

vol. II: 1937 – 1960 XXIIII begin to discover America… Chicago, December 10, 1984. For a whole fifteen minutes I have been standing by my window, staring blankly out into the street, without even understanding why. I got up from my desk because I thought it had started