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She regarded her memory as a graveyard; segments of her life were buried there, lying in separate graves, and she had no intention of reviving them.
it was the power of the radio that fascinated him, the unwavering optimism of a voice in the dark speaking to an empty space, trusting there was someone out there willing to listen.
childhood was a big, blue wave that lifted you up, carried you forth and, just when you thought it would last forever, vanished from sight. You could neither run after it nor bring it back. But the wave, before it disappeared, left a gift behind – a conch shell on the shore. Inside the seashell were stored all the sounds of childhood.
‘You can’t just say it like that. It’s a big commitment, to believe.’
Yet hope is a hazardous chemical capable of triggering a chain reaction in the human soul.
The heroes in those tales were, without exception, male, and none was her size, but that didn’t matter. If they had dared, so could she.
perhaps her home was not where she was born but where she chose to die;
in almost every language we use different words to talk about past and present, and for good reason. So, that was your past and this is your present.
She wondered whether, just as too many cooks spoiled the broth, too many revolutionaries could ruin a revolution,
From one end of the avenue to the other the crowd flowed, leaking out into the night like ink from a broken fountain pen.
Know yourself and know an arsehole when you see one.
Cemetery of the Companionless.
Once there was, once there wasn’t
‘Grief is a swallow,’ he said. ‘One day you wake up and you think it’s gone, but it’s only migrated to some other place, warming its feathers. Sooner or later, it will return and perch in your heart again.’
Truth could be corrosive, a mercurial liquor.
Rules were sometimes rules. At other times, depending on the circumstances, they were empty words, absurd phrases or jokes without a punchline. Rules were sieves with holes so large that all sorts of things could pass through; rules were sticks of chewing gum that had long lost their taste but could not be spat out;
what was love if it wasn’t nursing someone else’s pain as if it were your own?
pessimists were better at surviving than optimists, which meant that, logically speaking, humanity carried the genes of people who did not believe in humanity.
