The rumble of the life outside was like the sound of the sea which was rising gradually around her.
The prayer ended, 'May Almighty God defend us.' And God who is indeed mysterious, who had made no sign when they burned Pierre as he slept - not a clap of thunder, not a flash of lighting - mysterious...
The last time you were happy about nothing; the first time you were afraid about nothing. Which came first?
She haunted him, as an ungenerous action haunts one.
People talk about the happy life, but that's the happy life when you don't care any longer if you live or die.You only get there after a long time and many misfortunes. And do you think you are left t...
Justice’, she said. ‘I’ve heard that word. It’s a cold word. I tried it out’, she said, still speaking in a low voice. 'I wrote it down. I wrote it down several times and always it looked like a damn...
It's so easy to make a person who hasn't got anything seem wrong.
It's funny when you feel as if you don't want anything more in your life except to sleep, or else to lie without moving. That's when you can hear time sliding past you, like water running.
It was the darkness that got you. It was heavy darkness, greasy and compelling. It made walls round you, and shut you in so that you felt like you could not breathe.
If I could choose I would rather be happy than write.
I sit at my window and the words fly past me like birds — with God's help I catch some.
I have tried, I said, but he does not believe me. It is too late for that now (it is always too late for truth, I thought).
He says: ‘it doesn’t matter. What I know is that I could do this with you’ — he makes a movement with his hands like a baker, kneading a loaf of bread — ‘and afterwards you’d be different.
Everything in their whole bloody world is a cliché. Everything is born out of a cliché, rests on a cliché, survives by a cliché. And they believe in the clichés - there's no hope.
But you don't know the world,' I teased her.'No, only here, and Jamaica of course, Coulibri, Spanish Town. I don't know the other islands at all. Is the world more beautiful, then?'And how to answer t...
Blot out the moon, Pull down the stars. Love in the dark, for we're for the darkSo soon, so soon.
A vague procession of towns all exactly alike, a vague procession of men also exactly alike. One can drift like that for a long time, she found, carefully hiding the fact that this wasn't what one had...
A room? A nice room? A beautiful room? A beautiful room with bath? Swing high, swing low, swing to and fro...This happened and that happened...And then the days came and I was alone.
That expression you get in your eyes when you are very tired and everything is like a dream and you are starting to know what things are like underneath what people say they are.
Yes, I am sad, sad as a circus-lioness, sad as an eagle without wings, sad as a violin with only one string and that one broken, sad as a woman who is growing old. Sad, sad, sad...