We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead.
The heart is an organ of fire.
Everything that ever happened to me that was important happened in the desert.
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.
Because we want to know things, how the pieces fit. Talkers seduce, words direct us into corners. We want more than anything to grow and change. Brave new world.
The word should be thinkering.
So what was better for us all? An ignorance, or a cautiousness like his, towards our own hearts.
There was a time when I could have slept with his friend Briffa, for instance. Around him the air was always fraught with possibilities.
He had been slowing down, the way one, half asleep, continually rereads the same paragraph trying to find a connection between sentences.
In my work I sometimes borrow Claire’s nature, as well as her careful focus on the world.
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.