El amor es tan fuerte como la muerte.
This Captain had been brought up in Istanbul. His mind was made of minarets and domes. He capped himself with spacious ease. He was his own call to prayer.
Writers are often exiles, outsiders, runaways and castaways.
She hated the small and the mean, and yet that is all she had. I bought a few big houses myself along the way, simply because I was trying out something for her. In fact, my tastes were more modest – but you don’t know that until you have bought and sold for the ghost of your mother.
It has taken me a long time to learn how to love – both the giving and the receiving.
A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is.
The midgets acted all of the tragedies and many of the comedies. They acted them all at once, and it was fortunate that Tetrahedron had so many faces, otherwise he might have died of fatigue. They acted them all at once, and the emperor, walking round his theatre, could see them all at once, if he wished. Round and round he walked, and so learned a very valuable thing: that no emotion is the final one.
Living with life is very hard. Mostly we do our best to stifle life – to be tame or to be wanton. To be tranquillised or raging. Extremes have the same effect; they insulate us from the intensity of life. And extremes – whether of dullness or fury – successfully prevent feeling.
That night, I knew I would get away, better myself. Not because I despised who I was, but because I did not know who I was. I was waiting to be invented. I was waiting to invent myself.
I would cross seas and suffer sunstroke and give away all I have, but not for a man, because they want to be the destroyer and never be destroyed. That is why they are unfit for romantic love. There are exceptions and I hope they are happy.
Bombay. Cairo. Paris. New York. I’ve been to those places now. The curious thing is that no matter how different they are, people are all preoccupied with the same things, that is, the same thing; how to live. We have to eat, we want to make money, but in every pause the question returns: How shall I live?
Nobody can afford to sleep anymore. Do you realise how much it costs?
There’s a chance that I’m not here at all, that all the parts of me, running along all the choices I did and didn’t make, for a moment brush against each other. That I am still an evangelist in the North, as well as the person who ran away. Perhaps for a while these two selves have been confused. I have not gone forward or back in time, but across in time, to something I might have been, playing itself out.
She was night-time and words were the dream.
On the top of the hill looking out over the town I wanted to see further than anybody had seen. That wasn’t arrogance; it was desire. I was all desire, desire for life.
For myself I will plant a cypress tree and it will outlive me. That’s what I miss about the fields, the sense of the future as well as the present. That one day what you plant will spring up unexpectedly; a shoot, a tree, just when you were looking the other way, thinking about something else. I like to know that life will outlive me, that’s a happiness Bonaparte never understood.
The more I read the more I fought against the assumption that literature is for the minority – of a particular education or class. Books were my birthright too.
People do go back, but they don’t survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time. Such things are too much.
I have learned what love costs. I never count it but I know what it costs.
Truth is a questioning place.