I suddenly remember something I’ve been told about fear. That amid a hail of machine gun fire you notice the existence of your skin.
You’re always more unreal to yourself than other people are.
Sometimes I realize that if writing isn’t, all things, all contraries confounded, a quest for vanity and void, it’s nothing. That if it’s not, each time, all things confounded into one through some inexpressible essence, then writing is nothing but advertisement.
Oh, one is not always alone you know. I mean so alone that one might go mad. No, there are boats and trains full of people to watch and observe and then, if one ever feels one is really going mad, there is always something to be done about it.
And the girl started up as if to go and kill herself in her turn, throw herself in her turn into the sea, and afterwards she wept because she thought of the man from Cholon and suddenly she wasn’t sure she hadn’t loved him with a love she hadn’t seen because it had lost itself in the affair like water in sand and she rediscovered it only now, through this moment of music flung across the sea.
During this period, they say, Lol’s collapse was marked by signs of suffering. But what is one to make of suffering which has no apparent cause?
There is something suicidal in a writer’s solitude. One is alone even in one’s own solitude. Always inconceivable. Always dangerous. Yes. The price one pays for having dared go out and scream.
When you’re being looked at you can’t look. To look is to feel curious, to be interested, to lower yourself. No one you look at is worth it.
And as for him, it would be enough to make her understand that this was the smile she had seen the other evening near the building site and that it hadn’t been interrupted because of any willingness on his part not to allow it to appear, but that in reality it had never ceased flowing between them, an invisible spring, from the very first.
I see the war as like him, spreading everywhere, breaking in everywhere, stealing, imprisoning, always there, merged and mingled with everything, present in the body, in the mind, awake and asleep, all the time, a prey to the intoxicating passion of occupying that delightful territory, a child’s body, the bodies of those less strong, of conquered peoples. Because evil is there, at the gates, against the skin.
We said nothing about all this outside, one of the first things we’d learned was to keep quiet about the ruling principle of our life, poverty. And then about everything else. Our first confidants, though the word seems excessive, are our lovers, the people we meet away from our various homes, first in the streets of Saigon and then on ocean liners and trains, and then all over the place.
I want to belong to myself, to own something, not necessarily something very wonderful, but something which is mine, a place of my own, maybe only one room, but mine. Why sometimes I even find myself dreaming of a gas stove.
The person who writes books must always be enveloped by a separation from others.
Women should not let lovers read the books they write.
I showed him the sea. It’s a great luxury, being able to see it from the balcony. When cities are bombed there are always ruins and corpses left. But you can drop an atomic bomb in the sea and ten minutes later it’s back as it was before. You can’t change the shape of water.
I think that if I had played piano professionally, I would never have written books.
He can only express his feelings through parody.
Some birds are shrieking at the tops of their voices, crazy birds.
She opens her eyes, says: Stop lying. She says she hopes she’ll never know anything, anything in the world, the way you do. She says: I don’t want to know anything the way you do, with that death-derived certainty, that hopeless monotony, the same every day of your life, every night, and that deadly routine of lovelessness.
You ask how loving can happen – the emotion of loving. She answers: Perhaps a sudden lapse in the logic of the universe.
It’s as if they were happy, and as if it came from outside themselves. And I have nothing like that.