There’s more danger in the violence you don’t face.
Do you understand the sadness of geography?
There is a story, always ahead of you. Barely existing. Only gradually do you attach yourself to it and feed it. You discover the carapace that will contain and test your character. You will find in this way the path of your life.
He has been disassembled by her. And if she has brought him to this, what has he brought her to?
Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert.
What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power. Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table, held together by a familiar rhetoric. Those who already have power continue to glide along the familiar rut they have made for themselves.
Love is the use one makes of another.
Death means you are in the third person.
That’s one of the great sadnesses of any life – knowing what you know now and then remembering what you did not know then.
I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission but signs of pre-occuopation.
A novel is a mirror walking down a road.
Her life with others no longer interests him. He wants only her stalking beauty, her theatre of expressions. He wants the minute secret reflection between them, the depth of field minimal, their foreignness intimate like two pages of a closed book.
Every night I cut out my heart. But in the morning it was full again.
It’s a discovery of a story when I write a book, a case of inching ahead on each page and discovering what’s beyond in the darkness, beyond where you’re writing.
One of the things that happens in novels it’s almost like a continual debate with yourself. That’s why you’re writing the book. It’s why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.
Love is so small it can tear itself through the eye of a needle.
And it would be a spare life he would be certain to lead as a schoolteacher in some urban location. But he had a serenity that came with the choice of the life he wanted to live. And this serenity and certainty I have seen only among those who have the armour of books close by.
Over the years, confusing fragments, lost corners of stories, have a clearer meaning when seen in a new light, a different place.
It doubles your perception, to write from the point of view of someone you’re not.
For the first forty days a child is given dreams of previous lives. Journeys, winding paths, a hundred small lessons and then the past is erased.