Kairos

by Jenny Erpenbeck

All the memories he took such trouble to create will just be the altimeter for his plunge back into normality.

And if the fulfillment of desires here is only a matter of the price, doesn’t all desire convert into the one desire, for cash?

How to endure the way

that the present trickles down moment by moment and becomes the past?

She dresses him, and Katharina undresses him.

anticipation is even better than the thing itself, is

Time feels so sticky, it’s as though it had lost all capacity for passing.

takes just a moment to produce a misunderstanding, and a word out of place to start a quarrel, but they don’t have the following night to achieve a conciliation.

The shadow may be far longer than the object that casts it.

is a process, not a product.

He feels time pushing him forward, but without his participation.

the best thing for any woman is not to love but to be loved, and

time pours into life, is braided into it, grows into it, entwines itself with it, but is never one thing:

the concept of the nation, her father had said, was only devised to mobilize people for war without having to pay them. And

Everyone who participates in a revolution has his own reasons. And it’s only from outside that it looks as though all the principals are of one mind?