Nobody knows, nobody can ever know, not even in memory, because there are moments in time that are not knowable.
I could not persuade her that a place does not merely exist, that it has to be invented in one’s imagination.
People like my grandmother, who have no home but in memory, learn to be very skilled in the art of recollection.
To use the past to justify the present is bad enough—but it’s just as bad to use the present to justify the past.
Language was both his livelihood and his addiction and he was often preyed upon by a near irresistible compulsion to eavesdrop on conversations in public places.
I was already well schooled in looking away, the jungle-craft of gentility.
Speech was only a bag of tricks that fooled you into believing that you could see through the eyes of another being.
If there was an implicit self-hatred in trusting only your own, then how much deeper was the self-loathing that led a group of men to distrust someone for no reason other than that he was one of them?
It’s something you don’t see until it’s gone-the shapes and things have and the ways in which the people around you mould the shapes.
That unthinkable, adult truth: that need is not transitive, that one may need without oneself being needed.
Need is not transitive, one may need without oneself being needed.