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People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which
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Tragedy alters everything. I was born, and the woman in the wedding photo disappeared.
“Politeness. Now, there’s a poor man’s virtue if ever there was one. What’s so admirable about inoffensiveness, I should like to know. After all, it’s easily achieved. One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what’s left when you’ve failed at everything else. People with ambition don’t give a damn what other people think about them.
“One gets so used to one’s own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people.”
“A birth is not really a beginning. Our lives at the start are not really our own but only the continuation of someone else’s story.
In telling her tale, Miss Winter was like the light that illuminates everything but itself.
I could still feel my heartbeat measuring out the seconds. I could feel hunger growing in my stomach and thirst in my throat. I was so sad I thought I would die, yet instead I was scandalously and absurdly alive—so alive I swear I could feel my hair and my fingernails growing.
The funeral over, at last I could cry. Except that I couldn’t. My tears, kept in too long, had fossilized. They would have to stay in forever now.
Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes—characters even—caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.
The mind plays all sorts of tricks, gets up to all kinds of things while we ourselves are slumbering in a white zone that looks for all the world like inattention to the onlooker.
We live like latecomers at the theater; we must catch up as best we can, divining the beginning from the shape of later events.
We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delineaments, weight and dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the color of grief is common to us all. “I know,” he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did.
