The past is able to close round certain moments, as if they were seeds, and deliver them again fresh and living in the present.

The strangest thing about life is not its frightful cruelty, but that it can be gentle.

The gesture with which one generation guards the next is the movement, and the only time we see it clearly, of life itself.

Nothing lasts. Not even a great sorrow.

Language is memory and metaphor.

Critics have been amusing themselves for a long time by auscultating fiction for signs of heart failure.

jealousy, the most hideous emotion any human being ever suffers, has nothing to do with the mind. Or not at first.