It’s not that we have to quit this life one day, it’s how many things we have to quit all at once: holding hands, hotel rooms, music, the physics of falling leaves, vanilla and jasmine, poppies, smiling, anthills, the color of the sky, coffee and cashmere, literature, sparks and subway trains… If only one could leave this life slowly!
She leaned down and looked at his lifeless face and Leisel kissed her best friend, Rudy Steiner, soft and true on his lips. He tasted dusty and sweet. He tasted like regret in the shadows of trees and in the glow of the anarchist’s suit collection. She kissed him long and soft, and when she pulled herself away, she touched his mouth with her fingers…She did not say goodbye. She was incapable, and after a few more minutes at his side, she was able to tear herself from the ground.
We were never lovers, and we never will be, now. I do not regret that, however. I regret the conversations we never had, the time we did not spend together. I regret that I never told him that he made me happy, when I was in his company. The world was the better for his being in it. These things alone do I now regret: things left unsaid. And he is gone, and I am old.
A good apology is like a farewell, when you know you won’t see each other again.
You’re always haunted by the idea you’re wasting your life.
I had buried in my head this idea that you only made a home for [a] husband and children. I didn’t see a lot of women making a permanent home for themselves; I didn’t think that way. And also, I was on the road, so I was always living out of suitcases and cardboard boxes when I was at home, and even though I now, to this day, live in the same apartment that I did then, it was more like a storage place than an apartment.
It was only after I was 50 that … I began to make a home — a nest — for myself. And I take such pleasure in it. I think in general, as a culture, we tend to think there are two choices: settling down or traveling. And actually you need both. … Birds need a nest and they still fly. It took me a while [to understand] that it wasn’t either/or — it was both.
You will fall in love with train rides, and sooner or later you will realize that nowhere seems like home anymore.
I like trains. I like their rhythm, and I like the freedom of being suspended between two places, all anxieties of purpose taken care of: for this moment I know where I am going.
I guess that’s just part of loving people: You have to give things up. Sometimes you even have to give them up.
The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.
secretive dreams 