Then he said a strange thing, but to himself. `They lived, didn't they?' And I said yes, that when one reads old letters one understands that people in the past really did live, and it is very touchin...
It gave me a feeling of temporary acceptance into that elite community, to stroll across the quad at his side. It also gave me my first faint quiver of sexual belonging, the elusive feeling that if I...
In those days, I still thoroughly enjoyed the romance I called by myself; I didn't know yet how it gets lonely, picks up a sharp edge later on that ruins a day now and then-- ruins more than that, if...
Hay cosas menores, pero aun así muy importantes. No es amable. No sabe cuándo ha de decir algo que consuele y cuándo hay que callar. La historia le importa un pimiento. No tiene ojos grises dulces ni...
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?
We went on growing food and eating and sleeping and I cooked for a big crowd here every day, all my family. What else could we do? You just go on, if you have to.
The very worst impulses of humankind can survive generations, centuries, even millennia. And the best of our individual efforts can die with us at the end of a single lifetime.
The study of history should be our preparation for understanding the present, rather than an escape from it.
The station was crowded by the time the express pulled up. I felt then, as I do now, that there is no joy like the arrival of a train [...] particularly a European train that will carry you south.
She ate like a polite wolf.
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.
Ich verstehe mit achtzig was ich mit siebzig noch nicht verstehen konnte, naemlich dass man am Ende so gut wie allen vergibt, nur sich selbst nicht.
I wondered again if I might not actually be dead-if this was some terrible version of death, which I had momentarily mistaken for a continuation of life.
I lay awake for hours in my twin bed next to the other, empty bed, feeling and hearing the spruces, the hemlocks, the rhododendron scraping at the partly open window, the verdant mountain out there in...
He said there is a place in Gaul, the oldest church in their part of the world, where some of the Latin monks have outwitted death by secret means. He offered to sell me their secrets, which he has in...
Festina Lente (Hurry in slowly)
Gracefully
We Gypsies know that where Jews are killed, Gypsies are always murthered too. And then a lot of other people, usually.