What dangerous machines letters are. Perhaps it is as well that they are going out of fashion. A letter can be endlessly reread and reinterpreted, it stirs imagination and fantasy, it persists, it is red-hot evidence. It was a long time since I had received anything resembling a love letter.
I have lived for nearly ninety years and I know nothing.
What was to change many lives happened, and happened very fast in the next moments.
The human mind is a weird place.
The whole thing, the way it all happened, was shattering. And what it shattered most of all was some conception I’d had of myself, some wholeness.
If only one could believe that death was waking up.
Comenzar una novela es como abrir la puerta o un paisaje neblinoso; ves muy poco, pero hueles la tierra y sientes el soplo del viento.
The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction.
He felt removed from reality.
That too was part of a machine from which she had not, for all her ‘feelings’ and her ‘principles’, the spirit or the courage really to escape.
When dealing with a married couple one can never be neutral. The hot magnetic power of each one’s view of the other makes the spectator sway.
How we tracked him, you most of all of course, and lost him and found him.
I have always wanted to kill you, ever since the moment when I learnt of your existence.
You’re always wanting to be forgiven. What do you want to be forgiven for?
He had to go there because of Patrick; and because it was fated. Yes, that gave him courage, to feel that he had not sought it, it had come upon him, and however fruitless or disastrous that journey might be, he had to undertake it, because it was his fate.
I’m sorry, I’m not myself. Or rather I am myself, my new self.
One’s mind is such an old rubbish heap. All sorts of little bits of machinery start up.
Perhaps one could not live with such knowledge. One might die for it, or of it.
It had all been quite uncannily painless. I was left with a sense of not having suffered enough. Only sometimes in dreams did I experience certain horrors, glimpses of punishment which would perhaps yet find its hour.
Our relationship in fact was never idle. It was obvious that we constantly thought about each other.