Half a page--and the morning is already ancient.

So we came to understand that small and important thing, that our lives could be large with interesting strangers who would pass us without any personal involvement.

... the desert, where there is the communal book of moonlight. We were among the rumour of wells. In the palace of winds.

What night gave Rafael was a formlessness in which everything had a purpose. As if darkness had a hidden musical language.

It's a discovery of a story when I write a book, a case of inching ahead on each page and discovering what's beyond in the darkness, beyond where you're writing.

The trouble with all of us is we are where we shouldn't be.

when someone speaks he looks at a mouth, not eyes and their colors, which, it seems to him, will always alter depending on the light of a room, the minute of the day. Mouths reveal insecurity or smugness or any other point on the spectrum of character. For him they are the most intricate aspect of faces. He's never sure what an eye reveals. but he can read how mouths darken into callousness, suggest tenderness. One can often misjudge an eye from its reaction to a simple beam of sunlight.