I believe that always, or almost always, in all childhoods and in all the lives that follow them, the mother represents madness. Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met.

I have never waited for anything the way I've waited for today, when nothing will happen.

A book consists of two layers: on top, the readable layer ... and underneath, a layer that was inaccessible. You only sense its existence in a moment of distraction from the literal reading, the way you see childhood through a child. It would take forever to tell what you see, and it would be pointless.

When you wept it was just over yourself and not because of the marvelous impossibility of reaching her through the difference that separates you.

I'm still there, watching those possessed children, as far away from the mystery now as I was then. I've never written, though I thought I wrote, never loved, though I thought I loved, never done anything but wait outside the closed door.

The words emerge from her body without her realizing it, as if she were being visited by the memory of a language long forsaken.

In love there are no vacations. No such thing. Love has to be lived fully with its boredom and all that.