As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard. (...) You don't pick out the rain that soaks you to the skin when you come out of a concert.

---

Of all our feelings the only one which really doesn't belong to us is hope. Hope belongs to life, it's life itself defending itself. Etcetera.

---

Only in dreams, in poetry, in play do we sometimes arrive at what we were before we were this thing that, who knows, we are.

---

All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.

---

But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself,into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously.

---

The evolution from happiness to habit is one of death's best weapons.

---

The novel wins by points, the short story by knockout.

---

Where are the beginnings, the endings, and most important, the middles?

---

After the age of 50 we begin to die little by little in the deaths of others.

---

What most people call loving consists of picking out a woman and marrying her. They pick her out, I swear, I’ve seen them. As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard. They probably say that they pick her out because-they-love-her, I think it’s just the siteoppo. Beatrice wasn’t picked out, Juliet wasn’t picked out. You don’t pick out the rain that soaks you to a skin when you come out of a concert.

---