All That I Am

Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so.

At the end of our lives it is our loves we remember most, because they are what shaped us. We have grown to be who we are around them, as around a stake.

one does not remember one’s own pain. It is the suffering of others that undoes us

The human brain cannot encompass total absence. Like infinity, it is simply not something that the organ runs to. The space someone leaves must be filled, so we dream forever of those who are no longer here. Our minds make them live again.

I had very good eyes once. Though it's another thing to say what I saw. In my experience, it is entirely possible to watch something happen and not to see it at all.

This vast life - the real, interior one in which we remain linked to the dead (because the dream inside us ignores trivialities like breath, or absence) - this vast life is not under our control. Everything we have seen and everyone we have known goes into us and constitutes us, whether we like it or not. We are linked together in a pattern we cannot see and whose effects we cannot know.

I am a woman on her way to eat cake.

When Hitler came to power I was in the bath.

So much of love is curiousity, a search inside the other for some little piece of self; emerging from the bear cave of them with your birthday candle and filament of ore: the same as that I'm made of!

Why is it that with women, some kink, some vulnerability of the sex, is always presumed to lie at the heart of things- as if they have no other life, no relevance as important as that which they have for us men?

We were being offered exile on condition that we were silent about the reason we needed it. The silence chafed; it made us feel we were betraying those we had left behind. The British government was insisting on dealing with Hitler as a reasonable fellow, as if hoping he'd turn into one.

In my experience, it is entirely possible to watch something happen and not to see it at all.

None of us–teacher or taught–realised how an imagined romantic life can sustain you as a possibility, a hope, and remain just that. Like parallel train tracks, it runs alongside, but will never meet, the life you are living.

Children are the only people who can see adults from inside their lives, permitted to observe every small thing, as if their forming minds are incapable of judging what they see, or as if it does not lodge there, somewhere, permanently,

At least half of what we call hope, I believe, is simply the sense that something can be done. Once,

My body floated, loose from spent pleasure.

The blue-eyed rabbi in our village at Samotschin used to talk to me as though I were a grown person, even when I was just a boy. We must believe in God, he told me, because if we don't we will have to believe in man, and then we will only be disappointed.

The pills sit in there in their colours and shapes ready to push me, in plastic-coated increments, into my future.

To understand her," I say, "you have to understand what she was trying to do. Dora was ... a verb.

It doesn’t matter,' Dora said. 'The gist of it is true, rumour or not. It’ll be like 1914 when they said the French had attacked us. They need an emergency to save us from.' 'He IS the emergency,' I said.

It doesn’t matter,” Dora said. “The gist of it is true, rumour or not. It’ll be like 1914 when they said the French had attacked us. They need an emergency to save us from.” “He IS the emergency,” I said.

At my shoulder a vase of lilies breathed, open-tongued.

admiration was a difficult thing for Hans – there was always the risk he might compare badly in his own mind.

Tutto quello che abbiamo visto e tutti quelli che abbiamo conosciuto entrano in noi e ci costituiscono, che ci piaccia o no. Siamo collegati in un disegno che non possiamo vedere e di cui non possiamo conoscere le conseguenze. Un'imperfezione qui, un punto saltato là, una bozza tra le fibre, e l'intera stoffa sarà diversa una volta che è intessuta.

Il problema della vita è che puoi procedere solo alla cieca, in un'unica direzione. La memoria ha delle idee tutte sue; carpisce elementi da ogni quando e cerca di metterli insieme. Ti sorprende da tutte le angolazioni, con tutto quello che sei venuto a sapere in seguito, e ti comunica le novità.

A volte l'uomo è preso da un senso di nausea, fisica o spirituale, che lo priva di ogni volontà e determinazione e lo spinge, fiacco e allo sbando, a desiderare la morte. Allora sprofonda irresistibilmente verso la distruzione, verso un folle tuffo nel caos.

Per zio Erwin c'era un sorta di curriculum dell'esistenza in cui le cose da fare erano state stabilite dagli altri. Le soddisfazioni e i piaceri della vita non consistevano tanto nel farle, quanto nello spuntarle dalla lista.