If only she had begged him to stay. Now everything in the house scares her: the creaking stairs, shuttered windows, empty rooms. The clutter and silence. Etienne tries performing silly experiments to...
How do you ever know for certain that you are doing the right thing? There
Ele a fez o brilhante centro da vida dele; ele a fez sentir como se cada passo que ela dava fosse importante.
Dreaming of his future, he no longer heard all the things she did not say.
Don’t you ever get tired of believing, Madame? Don’t you ever want proof? Madame Manec rests a hand on Marie-Laure’s forehead. The thick hand that first reminded her of a gardener’s or a geologist’s....
Clair de Lune, a song that makes her think of leaves fluttering, and of the hard ribbons of sand beneath her feet at low tide. The music slinks and rises and settles back to earth,
And then I feel the Big Sadness coming on, like there’s a shiny and sharp axe blade buried inside my chest. The only way I can stay alive is to remain absolutely motionless so instead of whispering De...
And is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel those paths? That her father and Etienne and Madame Manec and the German boy named Werner Pfennig might harry the sky in flocks, like egrets,...
A second technician gauges Werner’s eye color against a chromatic scale on which sixty or so shades of blue are displayed. Werner’s color is himmelblau, sky blue. To assess his hair color, the man sni...
A scientist’s work is determined by two things: his interests and those of his time.
She imagines his head as a cabinet filled with ten thousand little drawers.
Learning happens on backless benches, at wooden tables grooved by the boredom of countless boys before them -- squires, monks, conscripts, cadets.
Each time he returned, he looked slightly different, not merely older, but changed: a new accent, the cigarettes, three sharp knocks on the door. It was as if the city was entering his body and remaki...
And doesn't a writer do the same thing? Isn't she knitting together scraps of dreams? She hunts down the most vivid details and links them in sequences that will let a reader see, smell, and hear a wo...
Here comes the light, nameless and intangible, streaming 93 million unobstructed miles through the implacable black vacuum to break itself against a wall, a cornice, a column. It drenches, it crenella...