Quotes from work

The History of Love

“The little boy I watched throwing pebbles into the empty fountain […] You could tell that he had too much wisdom for his age. Probably he believed that he wasn't made for this world. I wanted to say to him: If not you, who?”

“He died alone because he was too embarrassed to phone anyone.”

“That's what I do. Watch movies and read. Sometimes I even pretend to write, but I'm not fooling anyone. Oh, and I go to the mailbox.”

“The moment had passed, the door between the lives we could have led and the lives we led had shut in our faces.”

“Loneliness: there is no organ that can take it all.”

“… larger than life… I've never understood that expression. What's larger than life?”

“The truth is the thing I invented so I could live.”

“I like to think the world wasn't ready for me, but maybe the truth is that I wasn't ready for the world. I've always arrived too late for my life.”

“I forced myself to picture the last moments. The penultimate breath. A final sigh. And yet. It was always followed by another.”

“After all who doesn't wish to make a spectacle of their loneliness”

“The oldest emotion in the world may be that of being moved; but to describe it-just to name it-must have been like trying to catch something invisible.”

“Then I turned the page and at the top it said THINGS I MISS ABOUT M and there was a list of 15 things, and the first was THE WAY HE HOLDS THINGS. I did not understand how you can miss the way somebody holds things.”

“I was never a man of great ambition
I cried too easily
I didn't have a head for science
Words often failed me
While others prayed I only moved my lips”

“There are so many ways to be alive, but only one way to be dead.”

“So many words get lost. They leave the mouthand lose their courage, wandering aimlessly until they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves. On rainy days you can hear their chorus rushing past.”

“All the times I have suddenly realized that my parents are dead, even now, it still surprises me, to exist in the world while that which made me has ceased to exist.”

“… An average of seventy-four species become extinct every day, which was one good reason but not the only one to hold someone's hand…”

“When I got older I decided I wanted to be a real writer. I tried to write about real things. I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely.”

“He wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard […]. How could he have forgotten what he had always known: there is no match for the silence of God.”