What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it, and the stark awareness I had of being, for the first time in my life, entirely alone, a Crusoe shipwrecked and stranded in the limitless wastes of a boundless and indifferent ocean.
The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
The white May blossom swooned slowly into the open mouth of the grave.
The world is not real for me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language.
The past beats inside me like a second heart.
The first thought that occurred to me, that night when I heard the chairman of the jury announce my name, was, Just think how many people hate me at this moment. Naturally, I wanted to annoy those people even further by being arrogant.