가장 기억에 남는 건 무엇인가? 나직하면서도 자주 ...

가장 기억에 남는 건 무엇인가?
나직하면서도 자주 당혹스러워하는 사람의 목소리가 기억난다. 사람은 자기 자신과 대면할 때, 그리고 과거에 자신에게 일어난 사건 앞에섰을 때 놀라고 당황한다. 과거는 사라졌다. 과거는 뜨거운 소용돌이를일으키며 눈을 멀게 하고는 자취를 감춰버렸지만, 사람은 남았다. 평범한 보통의 삶 한가운데 사람만 남은 것이다. 자신의 기억 외에는 주위의 모든 것이 평범하다. 나 역시 목격자가 되어간다. 사람들이 무엇을 기억하는지, 어떻게 기억하는지, 무엇을 말하고 싶어하는지, 또 무엇을 기억에서 지워버리거나 기억의 저 깊은 구석으로 밀쳐버리고 싶어하는지, 그리고 장막을 쳐버리고 싶어하는지를 보고 듣는 목격자. 적절한 말을 찾지 못해 절망하면서도, 시간을 두고 생각하면 온전한 표현을 찾아내리라는 희망의 끈을 붙잡고 과거를 되살리려 안간힘을 쓰는 모습을 본다. - P256

"마음이 ・・・・・・ 너무 아파. 우리는 너무 이른나이에 전쟁터로 갔어. 아직 어린애나 다름없었는데, 얼마나 어렸으면 전쟁중에 키가 다 자랐을까. 집에 돌아왔을 때 엄마가 내 키를 재보았는데…… 그동안 10센티미터나키가 컸더라니까……" - P85

길은 오로지 하나다. 사람을 사랑하는 것. 그리고 사랑으로 사람을 이해하는 것. - P268

전쟁이 끝나고 나서 나는 오랫동안 하늘을 보기가 두려웠어. 하늘을향해 고개도 들지 못했지. 갈아엎어놓은 들판을 보는 것도 무서웠어. 그땅 위로 벌써 떼까마귀들이 유유히 돌아다녔지. 새들은 전쟁을 빨리도잊더라고…… - P554

나는 사람을 좋아한다. 그래야 하는 직업을 갖고 있기...

나는 사람을 좋아한다. 그래야 하는 직업을 갖고 있기도 하다. 소설이란 사람의 이야기니까. 그런데 아직도 사람에게 다가가는 법을 잘 모른다. 모른다기보다 어렵다는 게 더 정확하겠다. 술 없이 말을 시작하고, 술 없이 누군가의 삶 속으로 스며드는 게 나는 이 나이 먹도록 어렵다. 그래서 술을 마신다. - <마시지 않을 수 없는 밤이니까요>, 정지아 - 밀리의 서재
https://www.millie.co.kr/v3/bookDetail/179622896 - P258

나를 술꾼으로 키운 건 팔 할은 문창과다. 그 시절 문창과는 주사파가 주류였다. 흔히 아는 그 주사파가 아니라 술 酒 주사파. 술을 마시지 않는 자는 작가가 될 자격이 없는 것처럼 여겨지던 시절이었다. 그래서 술을 마시기 시작했다. - <마시지 않을 수 없는 밤이니까요>, 정지아 - 밀리의 서재
https://www.millie.co.kr/v3/bookDetail/179622896 - P260

내가 술꾼이 아니었다면 이 책 또한 세상에 나오지 못했을 것이다. 술이 있어 누군가의 내밀한 이야기를 들을 수 있었고, 그 이야기들이 모여 한 권의 책이 되었다. 이 책에 등장한 대부분의 사람은 아직도 내 곁에 있다. 이 책이 그들에게 혹여 실례가 되지 않으면 좋겠다. 앞서 말했듯 내 기억은 상당 부분 소설적으로 가공된 상태다. 어떤 왜곡이 있었을 수도 있다. 그러니 사실과 다르더라도 너그러이 이해하시길. 이 책을 나의 사랑하는 친구들과 나의 블루와 요즘 나의 벗이 된 참이슬에게 바친다. - <마시지 않을 수 없는 밤이니까요>, 정지아 - 밀리의 서재
https://www.millie.co.kr/v3/bookDetail/179622896 - P265

IT IS SOMETIMES said that exi...

IT IS SOMETIMES said that existentialism is more of a mood than a philosophy, and that it can be traced back to anguished novelists of the nineteenth century, and beyond that to Blaise Pascal, who was terrified by the silence of infinite spaces, and beyond that to the soul-searching St Augustine, and beyond that to the Old Testament’s weary Ecclesiastes and to Job, the man who dared to question the game God was playing with him and was intimidated into submission. To anyone, in short, who has ever felt disgruntled, rebellious, or alienated about anything. - P140

But one can go the other way, and narrow the birth of modern existentialism down to a moment near the turn of 1932–3, when three young philosophers were sitting in the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue du Montparnasse in Paris, catching up on gossip and drinking the house speciality, apricot cocktails. - P140

They set aside most of what had kept philosophy going since Plato: puzzles about whether things are real or how we can know anything for certain about them. Instead, they pointed out that any philosopher who asks these questions is already thrown into a world filled with things – or, at least, filled with the appearances of things, or ‘phenomena’ (from the Greek word meaning ‘things that appear’). So why not concentrate on the encounter with phenomena and ignore the rest? The old puzzles need not be ruled out forever, but they can be put in brackets, as it were, so that philosophers can deal with more down-to-earth matters. - P158

The first step had been a sec...

The first step had been a secret, involuntary thought, the second had been the opening of the diary. He had moved from thoughts to words, and now from words to actions. The last step was something that would happen in the Ministry of Love. He had accepted it. The end was contained in the beginning. But it was frightening: or, more exactly, it was like a foretaste of death, like being a little less alive. Even while he was speaking to O’Brien, when the meaning of the words had sunk in, a chilly shuddering feeling had taken possession of his body. He had the sensation of stepping into the dampness of a grave, and it was not much better because he had always known that the grave was there and waiting for him. - P132

It had all occurred inside the glass paperweight, but the surface of the glass was the dome of the sky, and inside the dome everything was flooded with clear soft light in which one could see into interminable distances. - P132

The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition. They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another. For the first time in his life he did not despise the proles or think of them merely as an inert force which would one day spring to life and regenerate the world. The proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened inside. They had held on to the primitive emotions which he himself had to relearn by conscious effort. - P136

"The proles are human beings," he said aloud. "We are not human." - P137

‘I don’t mean confessing. Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn’t matter: only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you—that would be the real betrayal.’ - P137

But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings: for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable. - P138

During the month that he had ...

During the month that he had known her the nature of his desire for her had changed. (At the beginning) there had been little true sensuality in it. Their first love-making had been simply an act of the will. But after the second time it was different.
The smell of her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feeling ofher skin seemed to have got inside him, or into the air all round him. She had become a physical necessity, something that he not only wanted but felt that he had a right to. - P115

"It‘s all Inner Party stuff. There‘s nothing those swine don‘t have, nothing. - P117

What he had actually expected was to see her naked. But she was not naked. The transformation that had happened was much more surprising than that. She had painted her face. - P118

With just a few dabs of color in the right places she had become not only very much prettier, but, above all, far more feminine. - P118

In this room I‘m going to be a woman, not a Party comrade." - P118

"Don‘t go on!" said Winston, with his eyes tightly shut.
"Dearest! You‘ve gone quite pale. What‘s the matter?
Do they make you feel sick?"
"Of all horrors in the world-a rat!" - P120

She brought the glass paperweight over to the bed to have a look at it in a better light. He took it out ofher hand, fascinated as always by the soft, rainwatery appearance of the glass.
"What is it, do you think?" said Julia.
"I don‘t think it‘s anything-I mean, I don‘t think it was ever put to any use. That‘s what I like about it. It‘s a little chunk of history that they‘ve forgotten to alter. It‘s a message from a hundred years ago, if one knew how to read it.‘ - P121

The room was darkening. He turned over toward the light and lay gazing into the glass paperweight. The inexhaustibly interesting thing was not the fragment of coral but the interior of the glass itself. There was such a depth of it, and yet it was almost as transparent as air. - P122

He had the feeling that he could get inside it, and that in fact he was inside it, along with the mahogany bed and the gateleg table and the clock and the steel engraying and the paperweight itself. The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia‘s life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal. - P122

The room was a world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk. Mr. Charrington, thought Winston, was another extinct animal. - P125

History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right. I know, of course, that the past is falsified, but it would never be possible for me to prove it, even when I did the falsification myself. After the thing is done, no evidence ever remains. The only evidence is inside my own mind, and I don‘t know with any certainty that any other human being shares my memories. Just in that one instance, in my whole life, I did possess actual concrete evidence after the event-years after it. - P128

"I‘m not interested in the next generation, dear. I‘m interested in us."
"You‘re only a rebel from the waist downwards," he told her.
She thought this brilliantly witty and flung her arms round him in delight. - P129

Talking to her, he realized how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant. In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird. - P129