Category Archives: Frenet

It’s been given to me to understand almost any form of unhappiness, that’s my talent. People come to me in their unhappiness because they sense I’ll share it. And when they move on, when they start their lives anew, I smile when I think of them, I want them to forget about me. I love them the only way I know. In another life I might have been a priest, a good man, instead of the bitter, remote person I’ve become.

— Frenet, Journal

All my life, the feeling of life having taken a wrong turn. Youth: knowing nothing not yet having lived enough. Ageing: knowing nothing not having lived enough when young. It’s in the odd boundless moments of my life that I live, in the moments that detach themselves from the rest of my ragged history, that gather and lift me up. I do whatever it takes to summon them, and in between try to bridge my past and present, to create the link that would save me but never comes.

— Frenet, Journal

I say ‘I’ to gather myself in, but as the word escapes my mouth I lose it, as I type it I give myself drift.

— Frenet, Journal

I type a few words, halfheartedly, delete half of them, smoke a cigarette, despair of my life, and if the right words come, if one right phrase comes, I’m found, or rather lost in a larger world, at least for a moment.

— Frenet, Journal

To write is to rewrite, which is to say to quibble, which is to say to lie. Thus to write is the work of the devil and to be written is the work of God. But to write is unavoidable and to write is also to be written.

— Frenet, Journal

Do I write or am I written? I write and I’m split in half – writing writes me and I’m one. Writing goes on and I’m lost.

— Frenet, Journal

This journal doesn’t exist. It splits into a hundred pieces as soon as I start writing it.

— Frenet, Journal

What an ordinary, artificial life I’ve led. And how ordinary and artificial it is to write about it, as if for ‘posterity’. What do I have to say? In an absolute sense, nothing. And that’s what I’m saying.

— Frenet, Journal

I read to encounter people who take life as seriously as I was meant to, whose very lives are at stake in their writing. But I hardly read, life gets in the way.

— Frenet, Journal

To encounter someone in the close distance or distant closeness that art creates is easy, but to stay with them in it is almost impossible. Life gets in the way.

— Frenet, Journal