I was all too aware that there's an unspoken law that you should never start to cry if you have too many reasons to do so. I told myself that my tears were due tot he cold, and I believed myself.
Windisch closes his eyes. He feels his eyes. He feels his eyeballs in his hands. His eyes without a face.
To combat death you don't need much of a life, just one that isn't yet finished.
He's looking into the night, in case a shadow comes to listen and look.
Everyday brought me further away from other people, I had been placed out of the world's sight, as if in a cupboard, and I hoped it would stay that way. I developed a yearning for being alone, unkempt...
Lola writes in her notebook: Leaf-fleas are even worse. Someone said, They don't bite people, because people don't have leaves. Lola writes, When the sun is beating down, they bite everything, even th...
Silence is also a form of speaking.
Silence is also a form of speaking. They’re exactly alike. It’s a basic component of language. We’re always selecting what we say and what we don’t. Why do we say one thing and not the other? And we d...
Tereza's death hurt me so much, it was as if I had two heads smashing into each other. One was full of mown love, the other of hate. I wanted the love to grow back. It grew like grass and straw, all m...
The Russian commands sound like the name of the camp commandant. Shishtvanyanov: a gnashing and spluttering collection of ch, sh, tch, shch. We can't understand the actual words, but we sense the cont...
No words are adequate for the suffering caused by hunger. To this day I have to show hunger that I escaped his grasp. Ever since I stopped having to go hungry, I literally eat life itself. And when I...
Jesus sleeps on the cross by the church door. When he wakes up, he'll be old. The air in the village will be brighter than his naked skin.
I'm always telling myself I don't have many feelings. Even when something does affect me I'm only moderately moved. I almost never cry. It's not that I'm stronger than the ones with teary eyes, I'm we...
I have packed myself into silence so deeply and for so long that I can never unpack myself using words. When I speak, I only pack myself a little differently.
How do you have to live, I wondered, to be in harmony with what you honestly think?
Today the grass listens when I speak of love. It seems to me that this word isn't honest even with itself.
Boredom is fear's patience. Fear doesn't want to exaggerate. Only on occasion--and fear considers this very important--does it want to know how things stand with me.
At a time I used to think that in a world without guards people would walk differently from the way we do in our country. Where people are allowed to think and write differently, I thought, they will...
