We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.
This last night we tear into each other, as if to wound, as if to find the key to everything before morning.
Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert.
A blind lover, don’t knowwhat I love till I write it out
This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.
I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission but signs of pre-occuopation.
Girls with poison necklacesto save themselves from torture.Just as women wear amuletswhich hold their rolled up fortunestranscribed on ola leaf.
You built your walls too, she tells him. So I have my wall. She says it glittering in a beauty he cannot stand. She with her beautiful clothes with her pale face that laughs at everyone who smiles at her…
…sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us.
The sloshing of their hooves in the paddy field that I heard thirty yards away, my car door open for the breeze, the haunting sound I was caught within as if creatures of magnificence were undressing and removing their wings
Every night I cut out my heart. But in the morning it was full again
What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.
The trouble with words is that you can really talk yourself into a corner. You can’t fuck yourself into a corner.”That’s a man talking,” muttered Hana.
The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.
She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.
She had always wanted words, she loved them, grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape. Whereas I thought words bent emotions like sticks in water.
He knows that the only way he can accept losing her is if he can continue to hold her or be held by her. If they can somehow nurse each other out of this. Not with a wall.
Nowadays he doesn’t think of his wife, though he knows he can turn around and evoke every move of her, describe any aspect of her, the weigh of her wrist on his heart during the night.
I can never understand someone by his strengths. Nothing is revealed there. I can only understand people by their weaknesses.
The Englishman left months ago, Hana, he’s with the Bedouin or in some English garden with its phlox and shit.
Jung was absolutely right about one thing. We are occupied by gods. The mistake is to identify with the god occupying you.
Aliganaya – ‘the embraceduring an intoxicated walk’or ‘sudden arousalwhile driving over speed bumps
We own the country we grow up in, or we are aliens and invaders.
I once traveled with a guide who was taking me to Faya. He didn’t speak for nine hours. At the end of it he pointed to the horizon and said, ‘Faya!’ That was a good day.
Here. Where I am anonymous and alone in a white room with no history and no parading. So I can make something unknown in the shape of this room. Where I am King of Corners.
How can you smile as though your whole life hasn’t capsized
I am someone who has a cold heart. If I am beside a great grief I throw barriers up so the loss cannot go too deep or too far. There is a wall instantly in place, and it will not fall.
How we are almost nothing. We think, in our youth, we are the centre of the universe, but we simply respond, go this way or that by accident, survive or improve by the luck of the draw, with little choice or determination on our part.
…how many of us have a moved heart that shies away to a different angle, a millimetre or even less from the place where it first existed, some repositioning unknown to us.
-I think you are inhuman. If I leave you, who will you go to? Would you find another lover?I said nothing.-Deny it,damn you!
I went mad before he did, you killed everything in me. Kiss me,will you. Stop defending yourself.
There was a time when I could have slept with his friend Briffa, for instance. Around him the air was always fraught with possibilities.
I am not in love with him, I am in love with ghosts. So is he, he’s in love with ghosts.
He refused to believe in his own weaknesses, and with her he had not found a weakness to fit himself against.
I was a man fifteen years older than she, you understand. I had reached that stage in life where I identified with cynical villains in a book.
Everything that ever happened to me that was important happened in the desert.
Because we want to know things, how the pieces fit. Talkers seduce, words direct us into corners. We want more than anything to grow and change. Brave new world.