We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.
To take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first fall in love there.
Sto leggendo Diderot anche riguardo agli attori e alla recitazione. Lui sapeva quanta vita passiamo a recitare una parte. Concepiva la vita come una forma di ipocrisia necessaria, in cui ciascuno reci...
Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
Of all the things we fashioned for them that they might be comforted, dawn is the one that works. When darkness sifts from the air like fine soft soot and light spreads slowly out of the east then all...
Lately I had been finding it hard to understand the simplest things people said to me, as if what they were speaking in were a form of language I did not recognise; I would know the words but could no...
It is in the forms of the living that the dead most convincingly haunt us.
In my world, there are no simple questions, and precious few answers of any kind. If you are going to write about me, you must resign yourself to that.
Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.
Byłem zawsze wyróżniającym się nikim, którego bezwzględnym życzeniem było stać się niewyróżniającym się kimś.
All my life I have lied. I lied to escape, I lied to be loved, I lied for placement and power; I lied to lie. It was a way of living; lies are life's almost-anagram.
In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
Yes, this is what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long indian summer, a state of tranquility, of calm incuriousness, with nothing left of the barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood, all th...
When you have once seen the chaos, you must make some thing to set between yourself and that terrible sight; and so you make a mirror, thinking that it shall be reflected the reality of the world; but...
When he was young, the lesson learned from his mother, as much by cuffs as caresses, was that love is action--what you do, not what you feel--but perhaps, he thinks now, it was a false lesson, and tha...
What is money, after all? Almost nothing, when one has a sufficiency of it.
W mojej pamięci jest swoim własnym cieniem. Która z nich jest realniejsza, kobieta, która rozłożyła się na trawiastej skarpie moich wspomnień, czy też ta powłoka kurzu i suchy szpik, jedyne jej ślady,...
Time and age have brought not wisdom, as they are supposed to do, but confusion, and a broadening incomprehension, each year laying down another ring of nesience.
This love, this mortal love, is of their own making, Hermes muses, the thing we did not intend, foresee or sanction. How then should it not fascinate us? . . . It is as if a fractious child had been h...
This is the way it is with me, always looking in or looking out, a chilly pane of glass between me and a remote and longed-for world.