All Our Names

I wanted to ask him if that was part of the plan, but I knew he would have said yes. The plan was to make war; anything that followed was part of it.

The men who beat me were driven as much by fear as hate.

The men who beat me were driven as much by fear as hate. They had lashed out blindly and left me for dead. Isaac had yet to feel that distinct version of violence, and because I was certain that soon enough he would, and that odds were when he did he wouldn’t survive, I didn’t bother to point out the difference. He offered me his hand as he bent down to kiss my forehead—a gesture that was intended to say that there was more between us now than just friendship. I gripped his hand just as tightly, and even lifted my head to his lips to make sure that he understood that I felt exactly the same way.

He held up his suitcase. “I’ve never had much to leave behind,” he said.

didn’t know one another’s names or ages or reasons for being there, and that was fine, because silence isn’t the same when it’s shared. Its sad and lonely sides are shunted off.

Silence isn't the same when it's shared.

Through them, the story becomes an argument for a better way of seeing, which has always struck me as being one of the novel’s better gifts, something which it is uniquely poised to do, if only because it demands the reader’s imagination, and by doing so affirms our capacity to live beyond the limited means of our private lives. We read not to encounter the Other, but to see ourselves refracted in a different landscape, in a different time, in shoes and clothes that perhaps bear no resemblance to our own.

I had lost too much of the heart and all the faith needed to stay afloat in a job where every human encounter felt like an anvil strung around my neck just when I thought I was nearing the shore.

For the first time in my life, every day when I woke up I had clean clothes, and something to eat two, three times a day, as much as I wanted. Once I had that, I realized my revolution was over.

As far as I could tell, no one had noticed us. I thought this was what it felt like to be invisible, but when I subtracted Isaac I realized that, until he came along, this was how I had always felt. Not invisible, but a natural part of the background, entitled to all the privileges that came with ownership.

I was reminded that without him I made an impact on no one. I was seen, and perhaps occasionally heard, strictly by strangers, and always in passing. I was a much poorer man for this than I had ever thought.

They stared at me, at Isaac, and then at the floor rather than at each other, as if they had long since come to terms with the fact that on any given evening men could burst into their house and do something terrible to them. There's no honest measure for the toll that sort of knowledge takes, whether the scale is the breadth of a single room or an entire city.

There is nothing more restless than men in power.