"The others in the dorm thought I wanted to be a writer, because I was always alone with a book, but I had no such ambition. There was nothing I wanted to be."
"Loving another person is a wonderful thing, and if that love is sincere, no one ends up tossed into a labyrinth. You have to have more faith in yourself."
"It's easy to talk big, but the important thing is whether or not you clean up the shit."
"Life is here, death is over there. I am here, not over there."
"That's the kind of death that frightens me. The shadow of death slowly, slowly eats away at the region of life, and before you know it everything's dark and you can't see, and the people around you think of you as more dead than alive."
"I’ve never once thought about how I was going to die,” she said. “I can’t think about it. I don’t even know how I’m going to live."
"The years nineteen and twenty are a crucial stage in the maturation of character, and if you allow yourself to become warped when you're that age, it will cause you pain when you're older."
"Somewhere between 'not enough' and 'not at all.' I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it - to be fed so much love I couldn't take any more. Just once. But they never gave that to me. Never, not once."
"He was a far more voracious reader than me, but he made it a rule never to touch a book by any author who had not been dead at least 30 years. "That's the only kind of book I can trust," he said."It's not that I don't believe in contemporary literature," he added, "but I don't want to waste valuable time reading any book that has not had the baptism of time. Life is too short."
"He was a far more voracious reader than me, but he made it a rule to never touch a book by any author who had not been dead at least 30 years. "That's the only kind of book I can trust," he said."It's not that I don't believe in contemporary literature," he added, "but I don't want to waste valuable time reading a book that has not had the baptism of time. Life is too short."
"When people tell a lie about something, they have to make up a bunch of lies to go with the first one. ‘Mythomania’ is the word for it."
"Colors shone with exceptional clarity in the rain. The ground was a deep black, the pine branches a brilliant green, the people wrapped in yellow looking like special spirits that were allowed to wander over the earth on rainy mornings only."
"Things like that happen all the time in this great big world of ours. It is like taking a boat out on a beautiful lake on a beautiful day and thinking both the sky and the lake are beautiful. Things will go where they are supposed to go if you just let them take their natural course. Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it is time for them to be hurt. Life is like that."
"Her cry was the saddest sound of orgasm that I had ever heard."
"No truth can cure the sadness we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness, can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see that sadness through to the end andlearn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sadness that comes to us without warning."
"That's the most important thing for a sickness like ours: a sense of trust. If I put myself in this person's hands, I'll be OK. If my condition starts to worsen even the slightest bit - if a screw comes loose - he'll notice straight away, and with tremendous care and patience he'll fix it, he'll tighten the screw again, put all the jumped threads back in place. If we have that sense of trust, our sickness stays away."
"It was a small room with dim light coming in the window, reminiscent of old Polish films."
"She and I were bound together at the border between life and death. It was like that for us from the start"
"Nights without work I spent with whisky and books."
"I'd like to have a good long talk with you once you've calmed down. Please call me soon. Happy Birthday."
"Then, all but instinctively, I took her in my arms. Pressed against me, her whole body trembling, she continued to cry without a sound."
"Writing from memory like this, I often feel a pang of dread. What if I've forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud?"
"I guess I've been waiting so long I'm looking for perfection. That makes it tough."
"Every once in a while she'll get worked up and cry like that. But that's ok. She's letting her feelings out. The scary thing is not being able to do that. Then your feelings build up and harden and die inside. That's when you're in big trouble."
"He was going to die soon, you knew when you saw those eyes. There was no sign of life in his flesh, just the barest traces of what had once been a life. His body was like a dilapidated old house from which all furniture and fixtures have been removed and which awaited now only its final demolition."