Kindle Notes & Highlights
I feel the happiness in my body, waves of happiness, a sensation I can pinpoint; it comes when we are all together. It cannot be real, such happiness, it cannot endure. There will be a price to pay for it.
I go out alone, as a man would, believing myself to be free.
When I begin to write, my first creation is a woman, alone and abused. I don’t realize I’m sketching a portrait of my mother.
I open all the windows in the apartment, fear flies out, the beauty of nature flows in and wraps itself around us:
every freckle the imprint of a kiss
I’m scared of the wind in the trees, of the shadows on the walls of my room, of the visions I conjure in my mind:
Ely has to have the lights on at night, with music playing, she’s afraid of the dark, afraid of being sucked in by the blackness and never coming back.
we spend our time there, playing ghosts. Real life frightens us more than the supernatural.
‘I’ve learned how to ignore things for which there are no words. Without a name, nothing can exist. Do you understand?’
France is an outfit I wear; Algeria is my skin, exposed to sun and storms.
She closes her eyes, and I have the feeling she and her books go to sleep together, skin to skin, as if the books were alive.
She folds down the corners of the pages, underlines passages, breaks the spines of her books, opens them out as if they were bodies, spreading their limbs.
I have a special place in my family: I am the one who must not be deflected from the path I’ve chosen, I am the artist, I’m entitled to wear disguises, to dress as a boy, to cast aside my frocks, to skip meals, to dive into the waves when the sea is rough, to threaten to jump off the balcony when I feel I’ve been wronged – mostly by my father’s stern demands.
In my mind’s eye, I see her adding a few drops of her own blood to my juice, to infect me with her talent.
In the metro I look around, in search of a girl or a boy like me; I don’t see any.
The women all look like her; I gaze at them one by one, my heart starts to beat faster every time, but it’s never her.
My mother says sadness that doesn’t go away can be a real illness, she says you can feel it under the skin, coursing through the body like a virus, moving from head to heart, from heart to stomach.
I’m not afraid of being hurt, being alone is the only thing I find truly sad.
