Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people’s ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.
Literature is the product of a strange rain of blood, sweat, semen, and tears.
If I were to say what I really think I would be arrested or shut away in a lunatic asylum. Come on, I am sure that it would be the same for everyone.
When I was done traveling, I returned convinced of one thing: we’re nothing.
Reading is more important than writing.
Only in chaos are we conceivable.
We all have to die a bit every now and then and usually it’s so gradual that we end up more alive than ever. Infinitely old and infinitely alive.
Then he went out without touching anything and put his arm around Ingeborg, and like that, with their arms around each other, they returned to the village while the whole past of the universe fell on their heads.
For a moment the two of them looked at each other, wordless, as if they were asleep and their dreams had converged on common ground, a place where sound was alien.
The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower.
The American mirror, said the voice, the sad American mirror of wealth and poverty and constant useless metamorphosis, the mirror that sails and whose sails are pain.
There’s no place on earth with more dumb girls per square foot than a college in California.
As time goes by, as time goes by, the whip-crack of the years, the precipice of illusions, the ravine that swallows up all human endeavour except the struggle to survive.
Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I’d rather not talk about it, because I didn’t understand it.
In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we’re no more than castrated cats.
Nothing good ever comes of love. What comes of love is always something better.
The truth is we never stop being children, terrible children covered in sores and knotty veins and tumors and age spots, but ultimately children, in other words we never stop clinging to life because we are life.
You have to know how to look even if you don’t know what you’re looking for.
You run risks. That’s the plain truth. You run risks and, even in the most unlikely places, you are subject to destiny’s whims.
The pain, or the memory of pain, that here was literally sucked away by something nameless until only a void was left. The knowledge that this question was possible: pain that turns finally into emptiness. The knowledge that the same equation applied to everything, more or less.
One is prepared for friendship, not for friends.