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.
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.