Married people grow like each other.
It was not merely that his brother was dead. His brain, too young to realize the full paradox, wondered with an obscure self- pity why it was that the pulse of his brother’s fear went on and on, when Francis was now where he had always been told there was no more terror and no more – darkness.
It was like hate on a deathbed.
Don’t you believe it. I’ll tell you what life is. It’s gaol, it’s not knowing where to get some money. Worms and cataract, cancer. You hear ’em shrieking from the upper windows- children being born. It’s dying slowly.
I’m sick with life, I’m rotten with health.
What do we ever get nowadays from reading to equal the excitement and the revelation in those first fourteen years?
She was his like a table or a chair, but a table owned you, too – by your fingerprints.
What is cowardice in the young is wisdom in the old, but all the same one can be ashamed of wisdom.
There are no coroners in Paraguay.
Eternitatea nu este o prelungire a timpului ci o absenta a lui.
He felt the sad relief of a man who realizes that there is one love at least that no longer hurts him.
What did the truth matter? All characters once dead, if they continue to exist in memory at all, tend to become fictions.
I thought of Phuong just because of her complete absence. So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.
I shut my eyes and she was again the same as she used to be: she was the hiss of steam, the clink of a cup, she was a certain hour of the night and the promise of rest.
Like some wines our love could neither mature nor travel.
It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
Hate is a lack of imagination.
There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.
If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?