I didn’t know who she was, but I had this fire inside me for someone I knew existed.
I think living with the absence of someone we love is like living in front of a mountain from which a person – a speck in the distance, on some distance ridge – is perpetually waving.
Where are people going? I wonder what they hope will happen and what they are afraid of? For me it’s the same thing and has to do with being loved.
When Bach died some of his children sold his scores to the butcher they had decided the paper was more useful for wrapping meat. In a small village in Germany a father brought home a limp goose wrapped in paper that was covered with strange and beautiful symbols.
Language is like looking at a map of somewhere. Love is living there and surviving on the land.
Even if you have loved only once in your life, you’re ruined.
It’s true the people we meet shape us. But the people we don’t meet shape us also, often more because we have imagined them so vividly. There are people we yearn for but never seem to meet.
Music is only a mystery to people who want it explained. Music and love are the same.
In the end I didn’t know who I was crying for, but it was something my body wanted to do, as though trying to digest grief.
Every day is a masterpiece, even if it crushes you.
Love requires imagination more than experience.
Language is like drinking from one’s own reflection in still water. We only take from it what we are at the time.
I want to feel it somehow happened like that because things happen for a reason. I want to believe this more than anything because if it were just an accident, then God must have died before he could finish the world.
It’s tempting to imagine how we could hurt someone close, because it reminds us how fiercely we love them.
I suppose the key to a good life is to gently overlook the truth and hope that at any moment we can all be reborn.
Love is also a violence, and cannot be undone.
We touched with a softness that pushed through the skin into memory, like arms plunged into a river – we could feel the weight of each other’s stones.
Whether you know it or not, we leave parts of ourselves wherever we go.
Anyone who is desperate or alone will agree there is comfort in routine.
The present grows within the boundaries of the past.