Maybe women are more in touch with the world. He said what did I mean, and I said, well, everything’s connected, isn’t it, and women are more closely connected to all the cycles of nature and birth an...
Love is anti-mechanical, anti-materialist: that’s why bad love is still good love. It may make us unhappy, but it insists that the mechanical and the material needn’t be in charge
Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.
Je li ljubav ono što će od nas ostati? Bilo bi lepo tako misliti. Bilo bi utešno kada bi ljubav bila izvor energije koji i dalje tinja posle naše smrti. Na nekadašnjim televizijskim aparatima, kada ih...
It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.
It seemed to us philosophically self-evident that suicide was every free person's right: a logical act when faced with illness or senility; a heroic one when faced with torture or the avoidable deaths...
It is important to understand that in the modern world we prefer the replica to the original because it gives us the greater frisson. I leave that word in French because I think you understand it well...
Istorija nėra nugalėtojų melai <...>, tai veikiau išgyvenusiųjų prisiminimai, ir dauguma jų nėra nei nugalėtojai, nei pralaimėjusieji.
In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when that moment came, our lives—and time itself—would speed up. How were we...
In a novel, all his life's anxieties, his mixture of strength and weakness, his potential for hysteria - all would have been swirled away in a vortex of love leading to the blissful calm of marriage....
In Jewish folk music, despair is disguised as the dance. And so, truth’s disguise was irony.
Il problema dell'accumulo, aveva scritto Adrian. Scommetti dei soldi su un cavallo, quello vince e la vincita passa sul cavallo della corsa successiva, e così via. Le vincite si accumulano. E le perdi...
If you don't know what's true, or what's meant to be true, then the value of what isn't true, or isn't meant to be true, becomes diminished.
If asked in a court of law what happened and what was said, I could only attest to the words heading, stagnating and peaceable. I’d never thought of myself as peaceable—or its opposite—until then. I w...
If I hadn’t decided on cremation and a scattering, I could have used the phrase as an epitaph on a chunk of stone or marble: Tony Webster—He Never Got It. But that would be too melodramatic, even self...
If I can't be sure of the actual events any more, I can at least be true to the impressions those facts left.
I've never written a book, except my first, without at some point considering that I might die before it was completed. This is all part of the superstition, the folklore, the mania of the business, t...
I think I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation. Perhaps this is what Veronica called cowardice and I called being peaceable.
I swiftly realised how grief sorts out and realigns those around the griefstruck; how friends are tested; how some pass, some fail. Old friendships may deepen through shared sorrow; or suddenly appear...
I still buy books faster than I can read them. But again, this feels completely normal: how weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life.