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It was enough to see the young woman blooming with that peculiar beauty that derives from a sudden sense of vocation.
I had realised that we humans are blameless.
For the first time in my life I shivered physically from something other than the cold; the world had sloughed away its skin and revealed itself as energy and light.
Families embraced more than had been the habit; fathers who expected to be beaten to death stroked the hair of pretty daughters who expected to be raped.
‘Don’t laugh,’ ordered the doctor, sotto voce. ‘It is our duty to hate them.’
‘Symmetry is only a property of dead things.
Their existence was nothing but friction (no wonder their skins were smooth) and an eternity of ceilings.
Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.
It was a beautiful day to die.
‘When loved ones die, you have to live on their behalf. See things as though with their eyes. Remember how they used to say things, and use those words oneself. Be thankful that you can do things that they cannot, and also feel the sadness of it.
What are you doing up there, you idle God?
But at last she understood the true source of all his fortitude and sacrifice, and she understood that nothing is less obvious in a man than that which seems unquestionable.
Pelagia pretended to herself that she was Italian, and from afar she was able to feel more a part of it precisely because distance and the fact that she had never been there permitted her never to discover that it was no more full of liberal humanist mandolin-players than Greece was.
I have been eaten up like bread.
This was because he spent nearly all his time at the taverna in his grandmother’s care, being cooed over by pink and sentimental foreigners who loved olive-skinned little boys with black fringes over their ebony eyes, just as long as they did not grow older and come to their own countries looking for employment.
‘He didn’t get married, he was too busy being strong.
How can a present not be present?
‘Of course I remember it.’ She let her head sink, and she wiped her eyes wearily. Suddenly, apropos of nothing in particular, she said, ‘I feel like an unfinished poem.’
Time was a complete bastard, no doubt of that.
