I believe in walking out of a museum before the paintings you've seen begin to run together. How else can you carry anything away with you in your mind's eye?
Never before had I known the sudden quiver of understanding that travels from word to brain to heart, the way a new language can move, coil, swim into life under the eyes, the almost savage leap of co...
In your country you don't care about history, and in my country we cannot recover from it.
But when you accept an intruder for too long, you invite him back later as a guest.
Faith is simply whatever is real to us.
You handle books all day long, every new one is a friend and a temptation.
It's a shame for a woman's history to be all about men-first boys, then other boys, then men, men, men. It reminds me of the way our school history textbooks were all about wars and elections, one war...
History has taught us that the nature of man is evil, sublimely so. Good is not perfectible, but evil is.
This time I felt my own face redden. Talking with this woman was like sitting still for a series of slaps, delivered arhythmically so you couldn't know when the next one was coming.
Akimbo,
You are a total stranger and you want to take my library book.
Politicians who talk about purity usually end up deciding who is pure and who is not.
People seem to believe that despair is the same as anguish, but it is not. It’s true that despair is surrounded by anguish, but at its core, despair is silent, a blank page.
Festina Lente (Hurry in slowly)
My guess is that he remembers some of me, some of us together, and the rest rolled off him like topsoil in a flash flood.
He can't really love anyone, you know, and in the end such people are always alone, no matter how much other people once loved them.
As a historian, I have learned that, in fact, not everyone who reaches back into history can survive it. And it is not only reaching back that endangers us; sometimes history itself reaches inexorably...
Then you must say to her, ‘Madame, I observe that your heart is broken. Allow me to repair it for you...
What will we someday do, I always wonder, without the pleasures of turning through books and stumbling on things we never meant to find?
Do you think artists are supposed to be happy? -Everyone is supposed to be. -I said staunchly,and I knew that I was indeed an idiot and that was my destiny and I didn't mind it