Commissioner Harris at the far end stared along the mad pathway. This was his first child and it had already become a murderer.
In a breaker’s yard you discover anything can have a new life, be reborn as part of a car or railway carriage, or a shovel blade. You take that older life and you link it to a stranger.
But isn’t it important for you to think she is smarter than you in order to fall in love?
Birds prefer trees with dead branches,’ said Caravaggio. ‘They have complete vistas from where they perch. They can take off in any direction.
But here they were shedding skins. They could imitate nothing but what they were. There was no defence but to look for the truth in others.
Soldiers were coming in with just bits of their bodies, falling in love with me for an hour and then dying.
He had approached the villa on that night of the storm not out of curiosity about the music but because of a danger to the piano player. The retreating army often left pencil mines within musical instruments. Returning owners opened up pianos and lost their hands.
In darkness, in any light after dusk, you can slit a vein and the blood is black.
They had all grown older, but he still did not feel he had wisdom to go with his aging.
Intotdeauna si-a dorit cuvinte, le iubea, crescuse printre ele. Cuvintele ii dadeau claritate, ii ofereau o logica, un tipar. Pe cand eu simteam ca vorbele indoaie emotiile ca pe niste nuiele inmuiate in apa.
A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands, knowing it is something that feeds him more than water.
We are expanded by tears, we are told, not reduced by them.
I think precision in writing goes hand in hand with not trying to say everything. You try and say two-thirds, so the reader will involve himself or herself.
There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross.
Everyone has to scratch on walls somewhere or they go crazy.
A love story is not about those who lost their heart but about those who find that sullen inhabitant who, when it is stumbled upon, means the body can fool no one, can fool nothing – not the wisdom of sleep or the habit of social graces. It is a consuming of oneself and the past.
The joyful will stoop with sorrow, and when you have gone to the earth I will let my hair grow long for your sake, I will wander through the wilderness in the skin of a lion.
The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.
Could you fall in love with her if she wasn’t smarter than you? I mean, she may not be smarter than you. But isn’t it important for you to think she is smarter than you in order to fall in love? Think now.
How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled.