It’s the future that keeps us from dying. If it were only a question of dying today it wouldn’t be so hard to accept. It’s easy enough to give up the pleasures of one day. But when we die we must die every day, without ever coming back. From the vantage point of death, the future is always infinite, even when we have just one day left to live. Face with nothingness, it is always a portion of eternity that we lose.
— Emmanuel Kattan (Love Alone)
Each return creates a new misrepresentation on the surface of the past; when we come back to the same memory too often, it becomes unrecognizable in the end.
— Emmanuel Kattan (Love Alone)
Our deeds, our desires, our dreams all have the same consistency. Killing a man, a dog or a flower amounts to the same thing. We’re free because we are already dead. We are free because by choosing death we have pierced a hole in time.
— Emmanuel Kattan (Love Alone)
I can recount, retrace the steps; but the substance of life, that links one step with the other, still escapes me. Language creates the illusion of continuity, but that continuity is still without texture, without colour, the meaning that it harbours dense and opaque. The life of the past doesn’t like being in the limelight. As soon as it feels examine, it hides away, silent, like a tracked animal. It spies on us and only comes out of the shadows when we’re distracted- it’s always when our backs are turned that it catches up and engulfs us completely.
— Emmanuel Kattan (Love Alone)
Our lives wait until our backs are turned to move ahead. As soon as we observe ourselves, as soon as we stop to take stock of the situation, to weigh the pros and cons, as soon as we question ourselves about our motives, our motivations, our reasons, nothing more happens. Under the searchlights of a mind too greedy to understand, the flow of existence is broken. Life is modest; it refuses to be looked at, scrutinized, analyzed, reduced to a single story. So, as soon as we try to understand it, fit it into a groove, it comes to a stand-still, plays dead- and nothing is left before us but scattered bits.
— Emmanuel Kattan (Love Alone)
I existed because he loved me and I loved him because he made me exist. Banished from my own body, from my thoughts, my habits, it was myself whom I found, plunged into him because his desire had traced my presence in the innermost recesses of his life. And when I left it was not only him that I lost, it was myself, the self I had become in him.
— Emmanuel Kattan (Love Alone)
I don’t want to have to prove to him that I love him; for me, it’s obvious- and when we try too hard to prove something obvious, doesn’t it mean fundamentally that we have some doubts?
— Emmanuel Kattan (Love Alone)
I’m not happy on my own, but I’ve also lost the certainty that everything would be sorted out if only I could dissolve into another universe.
— Emmanuel Kattan (Love Alone)
(Which proves that in spite of all my denials I have not completely lost the desire to be loved- even if it is by someone I’m not absolutely sure I love myself.)
— Emmanuel Kattan (Love Alone)
It’s the loves we haven’t lived that are the hardest to forget.
— Emmanuel Kattan (Love Alone)
