We search for patterns, you see, only to find where the patterns break. And it’s there, in that fissure, that we pitch our tents and wait.
There are times when the kindness of strangers only makes things worse because one realizes how badly one is in need of kindness and that the only source is a stranger.
No, what I felt was the torment of waiting, stuck between the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next which might or might not bring a hail storm, plane crash, poetic justice, or a miraculous reversal.
He died alone because he was too embarrassed to phone anyone.
One is always changing. I don’t want to write the same book and I couldn’t, because I’m a different person.
Sometimes I thought about nothing and sometimes I thought about my life. At least I made a living. What kind of living? A living. It wasn’t easy. I found out how little is unbearable.
I smiled back, the importance of manners, my mother always said, is inversely related to how inclined one is to use them, or, in other words, sometimes politeness is all that stands between oneself and madness.
Part of the work of writing a novel is to uncover the symmetries or connections that make it whole, which might not reveal itself at first.
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. It took seven languages to make me; it would be nice if I could have spoken just one.
I’ve reached the age where bruises are formed from failures within rather than accidents without.
At first Babel longed for the use of just two words: Yes and No. But he knew that just to utter a single word would be to destroy the delicate fluency of silence.
And if the man who once upon a time had been a boy who promised he’d never fall in love with another girl as long as he lived kept his promise, it wasn’t because he was stubborn or even loyal. He couldn’t help it.
Later – when things happened that they could never have imagined – she wrote him a letter that said: When will you learn that there isn’t a word for everything.
There were many things they simply didn’t talk about: between them, silence was not so much a form of evasion as a way for solitary people to exist in a family.
The moment had passed, the door between the lives we could have led and the lives we led had shut in our faces.
In life we sit at the table and refuse to eat, and in death we are eternally hungry.
The truth is the thing I invented so I could live.
When I got older I decided I wanted to be a real writer. I tried to write about real things. I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely.
How was it possible to wake up every day and be recognizable to another when so often one was barely recognizable to oneself?
It is impossible to distrust one’s writing without awakening a deeper distrust in oneself.