One of the pitfalls of childhood is that one doesn’t have to understand something to feel it. By the time the mind is able to comprehend what has happened, the wounds of the heart are already too deep.
Man…heats up like a lightbulb: red hot in the twinkling of an eye and cold again in a flash. The female, on the other hand…heats up like an iron. Slowly, over a low heat, like tasty stew. But then, once she has heated up, there’s no stopping her.
I can’t die yet, doctor. Not yet. I have things to do. Afterwords I’ll have a whole lifetime in which to die.
People talk too much. Humans aren’t descended from monkeys. They come from parrots.
There’s nothing here. Nothing at all.’Marina gave me a look that I could not fathom.’You’re wrong,’ she said. ‘The memories of hundreds of people lie here. Their lives, their feelings, their expectations, their absence, the dreams that never came true for them, the disappointments, the deceptions and the unrequited loves that poisoned their existence… All that is here, trapped for ever.
Man…heats up like a lightbulb: red hot in the twinkling of an eye and cold again in a flash. The female, on the other hand…heats up like an iron. Slowly, over a low heat, like tasty stew. But then, once she has heated up, there’s no stopping her.
They had parted as boys, and now life presented one of them with a fugitive and the other with a dying man. Both wondered whether this was due to the cards they’d been dealt or to the way they had played them.
Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.
Most of us have the good or bad fortune of seeing our lives fall apart so slowly we barely notice.
Time has taught me not to lose hope, yet not to trust too much in hope either.
Time goes faster the more hollow it is. Lives with no meaning go straight past you, like trains that don’t stop at your station.
Max had once read in one of his father’s books that some childhood images become engraved in the mind like photographs, like scenes you can return to again and again and will always remember, no matter how much time goes by.
Remember me, even if it’s only in a corner and secretly. Don’t let me go.
One loves truly only once in a lifetime, Julian, even if one isn’t aware of it.