He wanted to pay her; he thought women ought to be paid for keeping men from dying or going out of their minds.
For that’s what a woman, a mother wants – to teach her children to take an interest in life. She knows it’s safer for them to be interested in other people’s happiness than to believe in their own.
Alcohol doesn’t console, it doesn’t fill up anyone’s psychological gaps, all it replaces is the lack of God.
I suddenly remember something I’ve been told about fear. That amid a hail of machine gun fire you notice the existence of your skin.
A house means a family house, a place specially meant for putting children and men in so as to restrict their waywardness and distract them from the longing for adventure and escape they’ve had since time began.
I seldom read on beaches or in gardens. You can’t read by two lights at once, the light of day and the light of the book. You should read by electric light, the room in shadow, and only the page lit up.
I’m still there, watching those possessed children, as far away from the mystery now as I was then. I’ve never written, though I thought I wrote, never loved, though I thought I loved, never done anything but wait outside the closed door.
We, her children, are heroic, dersperate.
Banality is sometimes striking.
All that remains of that minute is time in all its purity, bone-white time.
When you wept it was just over yourself and not because of the marvelous impossibility of reaching her through the difference that separates you.
A prolonged silence ensues. The reason for the silence is our growing interest one for the other. No one is aware of it, no one yet; no one? am I quite sure?
Their voices reach out into the empty yard, plunge deep into the hills, go right through the heart.
Stormy skies, says Ernesto. He grieved for them. Summer rain. Childhood.
I am dead. I have no desire for you. My body no longer wants the one who doesn’t love.
The house a woman creates is a Utopia. She can’t help it – can’t help trying to interest her nearest and dearest not in happiness itself but in the search for it.
People come to Paris, to the capital, to give their lives a sense of belonging, of an almost mythical participation in society.
It’s only women who are not really quite women at all, frivolous women who have no idea, who neglect repairs.
There are many women who write as they think they should write – to imitate men and make a place for themselves in literature.
I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.