Some people are like that - closed - they can't learn from anyone. Us, for example, we can't learn anything, neither I from you nor you from me, nor from anyone, nor from anything, nor from what happens.
I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.
When you wept it was just over yourself and not because of the marvelous impossibility of reaching her through the difference that separates you.
I think about you. But I don't say it anymore.
Words don't change their shape, they change their meaning, their function...They don't have a meaning of their own any more, they refer to other words that you don't know, that you've never read or heard...you've never seen their shape, but you feel...you suspect...they correspond to...an empty space inside you...or in the universe...
I am dead. I have no desire for you. My body no longer wants the one who doesn't love.
I often think of the image only I can see now, and of which I've never spoken. It's always there, in the same silence, amazing. It's the only image of myself I like, the only one in which I recognize myself, in which I delight.
You tell yourself it would be best for her to die. You tell yourself that if now, at this hour of the night, she died, it would be easier. For you, you probably mean, but you don't finish the sentence.
Writing was the only thing that populated my life and made it magic.
She says people ought to learn to live like them, with the body abandoned in a wilderness, and in the mind the memory of a single kiss, a single word, a single look to stand for a whole love.
The woman is the home. That's where she used to be, and that's where she still is. You might ask me, What if a man tries to be part of the home -- will the woman let him? I answer yes. Because the he becomes one of the children.
It has been my face. It's got older still, or course, but less, comparatively, than it would otherwise have done. It's scored with deep, dry wrinkles, the skin is cracked. But my face hasn't collapsed, as some with fine feature have done. It's kept the same contours, but its substance has been laid waste. I have a face laid waste.
It's not that you have to achieve anything, it's that you have to get away from where you are.
In a certain state of mind, all trace of feeling is banished. Whenever I remain silent in a certain way, I don't love you, have you noticed that?
He says, You only came because I'm rich. I say that's how I desire him, with his money, that when I first saw him he was already in his car, in his money, so I can't say what I'd have done if he'd been different.
The story of my life doesn't exist. Does not exist. There's never any center to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it's not true, there was no one.
You alone became the outer surface of my life, the side I never see, and you will be that, the unknown part of me, until I die.
Stormy skies, says Ernesto. He grieved for them. Summer rain. Childhood.
The best way to fill time is to waste it.
Oh, I'd like to show you my gratitude, show you how ugly I am, how impossible it is to love me. I'd like to offer you that.
And then, one day, my love, you come out of eternity.
The solitude of writing is a solitude without which writing could not be produced, or would crumble, drained bloodless by the search for something else to write.
He wanted to pay her; he thought women ought to be paid for keeping men from dying or going out of their minds.
Finally he hears something: he thinks it is the ebb and flow of the sea, the water crashing back into the abyss of salt.
You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond. You have to be very fond of them to love them. Otherwise they're simply unbearable.
Yes, she can remember everyone admiring a rare kind of evening they spoke of as something the ought to save from oblivion to describe to their children later. And that for her part she would have had it hidden, had that late summer evening buried and burned to ashes.
I showed him the sea. It's a great luxury, being able to see it from the balcony. When cities are bombed there are always ruins and corpses left. But you can drop an atomic bomb in the sea and ten minutes later it's back as it was before. You can't change the shape of water.
He says he's lonely, horribly lonely because of this love he feels for her. She says she's lonely too. She doesn't say why.
We, her children, are heroic, dersperate.
In love there are no vacations. No such thing. Love has to be lived fully with its boredom and all that.
Perhaps you'll escape. Day and night, this obsession. It's not that you have to achieve anything, it's that you have to get away from where you are.
I feel a sadness I expected and which comes only from myself. I say I've always been sad. That I can see the same sadness in photos of myself when I was small. That today, recognizing it as the sadness I've always had, I could almost call it by my own name, it's so like me.
Oh, one is not always alone you know. I mean so alone that one might go mad. No, there are boats and trains full of people to watch and observe and then, if one ever feels one is really going mad, there is always something to be done about it.
You give me a great desire to love.
Kisses on the body bring tears.
I want to write. I've already told my mother: That's what I want to do-write. No answer the first time. Then she asks, Write what? I say, Books, novels. [...] She's against it, it's not worthy, it's not real work, it's nonsense. Later she said, A childish idea.
The words emerge from her body without her realizing it, as if she were being visited by the memory of a language long forsaken.
In a thousand years time this day will have existed for a thousand years to the day. And the ignorance of the whole world about what they've said today will have a date too.
We tell each other things that have no relation to the afternoon's events or the coming night but that relate to God, to his absence that is so present, like the breasts of the young girl, so young before the immensity of what is to come.
It's afterwards you realize that the feeling of happiness you had with a man didn't necessarily prove that you loved him.
The house a woman creates is a Utopia. She can't help it - can't help trying to interest her nearest and dearest not in happiness itself but in the search for it.
I know it's not clothes that make women beautiful or otherwise, nor beauty care, nor expensive creams, nor the distinction of costliness of their finery. I know the problem lies elsewhere. I don't know where. I only know it isn't where women think.
Alcohol is barren. The words a man speaks in the night of drunkenness fade like the darkness itself at the coming of day.
Banality is sometimes striking.
I already know a thing or two. I know it's not clothes that make women beautiful or otherwise, nor beauty care, nor expensive creams, nor the distinction or costliness of their finery. I know the problem lies elsewhere. I don't know where. I only know it isn't where women think.
Heterosexuality is dangerous. It tempts you to aim at a perfect duality of desire.
What could Maria call the time that opened ahead of her? The certainty of her hope? This rejuvenated air she was breathing? This incandescence, this bursting of a love at last without object?
Men like women who write. Even though they don't say so. A writer is a foreign country.
